Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary | Hacker News Reader

Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary

bls.gov

72 pointsgeox66 comments

Could we meet the HN guidelines against editorialization, and call this the less incendiary "Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary"?

Some facts:

* The number of job openings declined to 10.4 million

* Hires decreased to 6.3 million

* Separations were unchanged at 6.0 million

* Within separations, the number of layoffs decreased but the number of voluntary separations increased to 4.3M

within the number of voluntary separations (see https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t04.htm):

* Private industry quits up from 3.87M to 4.1M (increase of 140K workers), primarily driven by Accommodation and Food Services (157K more quits. Wow.). The other separations were not particularly meaningful. Next biggest was healthcare (+30K). Perhaps this is due to the traveling nurses phenomena. Everything else was noise and separations decreased in all other industries (in aggregate) other than Hotels and restaurants.

This does point out that the Hotel and Restaurant industry is still being hit hard. Note that just because something is a "quit" doesn't mean that it was voluntary per, se. It could be a buyout offer, or people quitting who have had their hours reduced or are earning much less in tips to keep working. Hotels and Restaurants are definitely hurting due to ongoing lockdowns and reduced travel.

Note that in Information, separations declined. In Professional and Business services, separations went from from 697K to 706K (+1.3%). That is statistical noise.

>This does point out that the Hotel and Restaurant industry is still being hit hard.

It's also the case that my observation while traveling to a number of different places the last couple of months is that a lot of restaurants are still having trouble getting staff. I got into one (crowded) restaurant just before it was closing at 3pm on a Sunday and it wasn't reopening until Thursday. A lot of mid-week closures in the city that didn't seem to be the result of weak demand.

Now, could they just increase wages until they hire enough people? Possibly. But if it's not a coordinated effort, they'll probably lose out to a competitor and presumably higher prices have some effect on collective demand given that eating out is not a necessity in general.

I ate at another restaurant in another city that had explicitly jacked up prices considerably--like maybe 40%. It was empty even though other restaurants in the area looked pretty busy. And service was still pretty bad.

Yes, the problem here is that as fewer people are dining, there just isn't the revenue to raise wages.

If you look at someone like a waiter, he is as busy as the number of customers and the amount they are ordering. If he is spending a lot of time standing around, well, then his wages are going to have to be cut. It could easily be cut to such a low level so that the waiter can't pay his bills and has to quit.

So restaurants can be in the simultaneous situation of not being able to hire enough workers to handle some peak hours, but also not being able to pay those workers enough to work full time for them.

And raising prices again results in fewer customers who can always eat at home or order delivery, which doesn't need the waiter. Restaurants, if they could just raise prices and earn more revenue, would do so. They charge as much as they can, assuming they are well run, to already maximize revenue, regardless of what they pay waiters.

You have even a bigger problem with hotels. If the hotel doesn't have enough guests, it's going to have to either lay off the cleaning staff and hotel staff, or reduce their hours and pay. And again, that could mean that the hotel staff have to quit. Here, too, the hotel is already charging what the market will bear to maximize revenue.

It's just a screwed up labor market when it comes to Hotels and Restaurants.

One thing hotels are doing is essentially getting rid of cleaning during a stay for "COVID safety reasons." Now, I don't doubt that there is an element of that--and some chains have off and on been willing to trade cleaning for a few loyalty program points pre-COVID.

In general, I'd observe that hotel pricing, while certainly not dirt-cheap, is at relatively "rational" levels in places where you were easily getting in the $300-400/night range pre-pandemic. (And that was for generally midrange business hotels.)

I've noticed that, too.

My guess is that both restaurants and hotels plunged a lot right at the beginning, and now they've recovered about 2/3 of that and that recovery has now stalled. People are still trying to figure out what is sustainable and what isn't, in terms of staffing.

We may not see this industry rebound to pre-covid employment levels ever. For instance, Uber delivery and other services may just be a thing and permanently shift labor away from waiters, and hotels may have permanently ceded market shares to AirBnBs or other lower service offerings. Maybe in the future, daily cleanings will be seen as some kind of odd luxury.

But I think it's all up in the air right now.

I agree with all that. Whether it's cheaper rates for "serviced apartments" that only clean once per week and tend to have cheaper rates, cooking at home, watching more movies at home, or any number of other behaviors that shift money from one group to another (including the consumers of the services), there's pretty much zero reason to expect that the new normal looks like the old normal.

Just to take one of the most obvious examples, there will probably be fewer person days in downtown offices which has all sorts of ripple effects. And I expect fewer flights to do a quick meet and greet lunch or to have various internal pro forma meetings every single quarter.

I've seen some surveys about this sort of thing but no one really knows what it will look like until it plays out.

How much cost does daily cleaning presumably add to a hotel room?

I'm imagining that the 20 or 30 minutes of labor is the majority of it. So like $10-15 dollars.

Where am I going wrong?

No, you're probably about right on a marginal basis. When hotel chains give loyalty points credit, they give about $5-10 worth. If you do it systematically at the level of an entire hotel/apartment, you can probably save more. But still. Probably less than $25-30 which isn't nothing competitively to slice off a room rate even at expensive urban hotel prices. (Or to add to your profit given that I honestly don't really care much about or value daily cleaning and, to be honest, it can be a bit of a nuisance.)

Just one more cost (from the perspective of the consumer) to take out of the system, which someone was making money to supply.

It depends on how consistently the hotel is occupied and how many rooms you can amortize the labor costs over. Quality housekeepers cannot be spun up on demand, so if you are not giving them consistent pay, then they will find something else, but you need to consistently sell room nights in order to do that.

Uber food delivery is insane and no way that its a sustainable business. It's absurd paying $25 for a meal that's $10

While I tend to agree--I've never used any of these delivery services--there is a slippery slope where you can also argue that local takeout and fast food generally is "absurd" compared to just cooking a simple meal at home, whether delivered or picked up.

In the higher cost of living areas I am familiar with, there is a material difference from 10 and 20 years ago. The calculus changes when a quality takeout or fast food meal goes from $10 per person to $20 per person. It might be worth purchasing meals when it is a few dollars extra in exchange for saving your time, but when it is a $10+ premium, it changes the calculus for a lot of people.

I don't really disagree. If I really don't feel like cooking/don't have stuff in the house, spending 20 minutes to drive (or walk if I were in a city) to my local pizza place for a $10 pizza or sub isn't that different from cooking--at least for a single person. I wouldn't spend $25 even though I could afford it.

But aside from some pizza delivery in college, I've never been in a situation where I had access to cheap and decent takeout delivery options.

Hmm, it's been years and years since I worked in cafes, but I don't think cutting wages is very common - cutting hours or shifts, yes. Of course, with tipped wage laws in some states, people barely get paid in the first place[1] so not having customers (and tips) would drive you to quit I'd think.

1: https://www.minimum-wage.org/tipped

The net result is the same. They're not getting paid enough to work outside of peak hours.

> It's just a screwed up labor market when it comes to Hotels and Restaurants.

It was a screwed up labor market. Basically, the bottom two deciles working for garbage wages and working conditions to the benefit of everyone else.

If those people can find better work/compensation options, good for them, even if it means less eating out and traveling for others.

I would love to see higher pricing for late night meals or overnight/weekend/holiday shifts at a hotels, restaurants, and other leisure businesses.

This biggest hinderance to adoption of UBI (imho) is the fact that nobody will want to 'volunteer' as the 'servant' class... I mean some will, most who would will do it part-time, most people probably could get by without restaurants. It'd be painful, maybe communities work together and form communal kitchens where people take turns making meals, and maybe they get tipped for the effort...

I'd rather not have the options to eat at places where people hate working, if it meant that person could have a better life, I'd be bummed when I'm craving something, but I'd find an alternative.

The wealthiest people and upper class they probably couldn't survive if the only option was cooking something themselves. They'd probably end up hiring a personal chef for 500k/year, or something elaborate... There's so many jobs the top levels would never volunteer to do, not even just for a podcast or something. Dirty jobs or jobs that just suck.

I consider these jobs basically modern forced servitude. Make no mistake you are forced unless you like being homeless and starving.

I'm anxiously watching what happens, something has to balance out soon. It happened in the 1920s, and I think 60 years earlier... we're just do for a great re-balancing. It won't be pretty, and it'll be harder than any before it (global warming and all) but if we succeed, maybe post-scarcity could be in reach.

With a UBI I'd probably go back to cooking professionally. Not for the crazy hour weeks I was doing though, but more passion cooking.

> This biggest hinderance to adoption of UBI (imho) is the fact that nobody will want to 'volunteer' as the 'servant' class... I mean some will, most who would will do it part-time, most people probably could get by without restaurants. It'd be painful, maybe communities work together and form communal kitchens where people take turns making meals, and maybe they get tipped for the effort...

Why would anyone need to volunteer to be in the servant class?

The biggest hinderance to UBI is the 50% to 95% class not being able to afford all their normal luxuries since they are based on being able to purchase cheap toilet cleaning labor, due to the circumstances in which the people cleaning toilets were born.

So many of people’s expectations of quality of life rely on them being above others on the socioeconomic ladder, that messing with this ranking is a political minefield. But supply and demand does not care for politics, hence you see the gutted US manufacturing moving to China, and the current moaning about “labor shortages” when migrant Mexican/Latin american labor slowed down due to Covid.

Can anyone explain how these people are making money? This is a serious question. It's easy to understand why they want to leave food and hospitality jobs, but are there other industries hiring these workers at higher wages? Are they working at Amazon warehouses?

Yes many of them are. Amazon added a huge number of warehouse and logistics jobs in 2020.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/29/amazon-...

I suspect that a big factor at play is that a lot of ex-restaurant workers realized those jobs kind of suck. The pandemic made a lot of restaurants close and lay off staff without a foreseeable return date, pushing people to seek employment outside the sector.

If enough such people decided not to try to come back when restaurants reopened, you'd see restaurants struggling to attract employees in a tight labor market and the resulting employees being, on average, less experienced / skilled.

Compound that with the remaining employees getting increasingly burnt out working at a short staffed restaurant.

> I got into one (crowded) restaurant just before it was closing at 3pm on a Sunday and it wasn't reopening until Thursday. A lot of mid-week closures in the city that didn't seem to be the result of weak demand.

> Now, could they just increase wages until they hire enough people? Possibly. But if it's not a coordinated effort, they'll probably lose out to a competitor

Or they'll be the place that's reliably open all week!

Some cities just have more restaurants than customer demand can possibly support. A lot of people like to cook and think it would be fun to open a restaurant. Even before the pandemic, most restaurants failed within a few years.

Fixed now. Submitted title was "4.3M Americans quit their jobs in August". Submitters: please don't do that. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Perhaps the lede got buried.

>> Over the 12 months ending in August 2021, hires totaled 72.6 million and separations totaled 66.7 million, yielding a net employment gain of 5.9 million. These totals include workers who may have been hired and separated more than once during the year.

It’s a good thing that the workers have the leverage to ask for better pay, condition. The striketober [1] may even end up being a good thing for the economy.

[1] https://twitter.com/fareedzakaria/status/1452357666236420104

I don't find many of Fareed's arguments supporting the "this will be very good for the economy" to be very convincing. Instead, they sound like a desperate attempt to put a positive spin on an economy that is clearly sick.

Average hourly earnings have increased from $24.79 in September 2020 to $26.15 in June 2021. Great! How much has the price of goods and services increased during the same time? Rising wages that don't keep up with worrisome and probably-not-transitory inflation are not a good thing.

And the whole bit about entrepreneurship sounds weird. What kind of business is the average person who couldn't find a job with acceptable pay really starting? Are these newly minted "entrepreneurs" really starting businesses that will be capable of paying themselves decent wages and providing adequate benefits?

Do you really think there is a "striketober"? BLS data wont come out until Nov 31, but I'd gladly bet that there were fewer than 15K workers on strike in October 2021, out of a labor force of 165 Million, defined by BLS tracking.

We can wager for honor, if you like.

And there will be even more churn due to two factors:

1. Vax mandates. I thought the admin would have enough sense to impose these after Christmas (or not impose them at all), but they're dumb enough to fuck up the economy right as we go into the holidays. I predict much regret in the midterms.

2. Inflation - unskilled workers might not be able to afford food/shelter anymore at their current level of income, and will therefore be forced to find better paying jobs. Upper middle class me is starting to feel the sticker shock at the grocery store ($350 at Costco the other day), I can only imagine how it is for folks of lesser means. Worse, this will be ongoing as inflation always outpaces income growth at the lower end of the labor market, and "better paying jobs" will cause even more inflation as costs will be passed onto the consumers.

> Worse, this will be ongoing as inflation always outpaces income growth at the lower end of the labor market, and "better paying jobs" will cause even more inflation as costs will be passed onto the consumers.

I do not see why this must be true. It might affect upper middle class people shopping at Costco, but there is no reason there cannot be absolute gains made at the very bottom in terms of wages and working conditions. The people having to shop at dollar tree or working evenings and weekends is who might really feel the lift. They were not eating out or going on vacations anyway.

This must be true because the bottom isn't the bottom because it just isn't worth much or has no value, it's the bottom because it's constructed that way. The idea is that there is a large pool of workers that could do the job, so you can just keep driving down conditions and wages right up to the edge where you still have enough desperate people willing to show up for it. It's essentially the other side of market forces... (which ends up in human abuse essentially)

A large pool of workers can mop the floors, but if the same pool of workers has better options, then employers cannot drive down conditions and wages.

For example, if bars and clubs lose their illegal barback labor because immigration from Mexico has slowed or stopped. Or strawberry farmers. Or people stop having 3+ kids, or even 2+ kids, and have them later in life, and the demand for people willing to change bedpans in nursing homes for $15 an hour is much higher than supply of labor.

You're missing the point. The wages will _nominally_ rise. I'm sure the politicians will beat their chest over this fact in front of the fiscally illiterate public. It's just that the prices will rise slightly faster than wages. Or not so slightly if we enter hyperinflation, which we might. That's why inflation is called a "tax on the poor". The poor and lower middle class don't have the option of putting their savings into any assets that are even remotely protected against inflation, since they don't have any savings in the first place and live hand to mouth as it is.

> It's just that the prices will rise slightly faster than wages.

This is not an inevitability.

Wages can rise for the bottom deciles more than prices rise. The difference would come from wages rising less or even decreasing for the upper deciles. It would also cause asset prices to rise less (or maybe even decrease) as labor expenses rise.

In other words, wealth transfer, where the income/wealth gap decreases. As an illustration, someone used to getting Starbucks every day can only get it once per week now. And someone who used to never be able to buy Starbucks can get it once per week now.

Are you Paul Krugman or something? I mean, there aren't any examples of what you're suggesting at least in the past hundred years, and yet you suggest it might happen. Might it? Sure, I might win a PowerBall jackpot next week, too. Will it? Based on historical evidence chances of it happening are nil. I'd be willing to bet hard cash on this outcome. There's also no plausible mechanism, short of a dramatic reduction in labor supply, that could drive a macroeconomic trend like this. Not to mention that even if it does happen, the prices will rise faster than wages - labor is a good chunk of the price in the first place, and you, the employer gotta pay social security off those increased wages, so bake in another 6% into that labor cost delta. Guess who will be paying for that? The consumer, AKA the working class largely. And this absolutely, under no circumstances, will cause any "wealth redistribution" from the rich to the poor. It'll be in the other direction. The rich can pay the poor in worthless QE fiat, while they hold inflation-protected assets.

I've seen this shit happen with my own eyes and experienced it on my own skin in the 90s in Russia. I didn't have any money back then, but my parents had a little, and they lost pretty much all of their life's savings.

Does poor people in China moving up the socioeconomic ladder compared to the “middle class” factory workers in the US who moved down the socioeconomic ladder not count as if happening in the previous century?

> There's also no plausible mechanism, short of a dramatic reduction in labor supply, that could drive a macroeconomic trend like this.

Is proportion of working age population and fertility rates not going down? Of course they can be offset with immigration and automation, but will it be for the types of labor requested by the increasing proportion of old people?

I do not know the future for sure, but one big variable that has changed is slowing population growth. The government can print all the fiat it wants, but it will not make the necessary labor appear out of thin air if people are not having kids at the same rate as before. Immigration and automation might blunt the impact of slowing population growth, but it may not be able to absorb all of it.

China is experiencing increasing demand for labor thanks to our inability to make stuff in the Rust Belt. China is also, at least to some extent, a planned economy (and has planned demographics, too). As such it is subject to a different set of supply/demand tradeoffs, and definitely not a good pattern to extrapolate from.

Any fertility-related stuff will take decades to play out, and it'd have to outpace off-shoring, legal immigration, and illegal migration, none of which is the case today or will be in the foreseeable future. It is not the case specifically for this reason: the rich like abundant supply of cheap labor. They achieve this abundance through both reducing demand and increased supply. Worse, reduced fertility will result in state's inability to provide social services and healthcare to the elderly poor, which means rising taxes and therefore further acceleration of off-shoring. In this regard we are too very much unlike China where the young are supposed to care for _their_ elderly.

If our government thought at least 20 years ahead, they'd be trying to stimulate the birth rate, boost manufacturing, and they'd clamp down on the borders. But their planning horizon does not extend beyond 4 years, unlike, say, Xi Jinping's.

> our government thought at least 20 years ahead, they'd be trying to stimulate the birth rate, boost manufacturing, and they'd clamp down on the borders.

it is hubris to think that mere mortals can predict complex chaotic systems 20 yrs ahead.

I think allowing people the freedom to choose and let individuals make the best choices available to them is really the only "good" way forward. Planning an economy, or planning population growth, as seen done in the past, had not ever worked out.

I did not say they can "predict" such systems. Plans are useless, planning is indispensable. You can course correct as you go, as long as you're going somewhere in particular, which I'm not sure we are at this point.

I'm not sure what the mechanism would be for this- it seems like the last 100 years have been solidly trending toward greater and greater wealth inequality, with a brief hiatus caused by new deal policies and the great depression. Even worse, since the 50s wealth generated by increased production from automation has accelerated this trend, breaking the rough correlation between productivity and real median family income.

In short, there is no way we can fix this (as far as I can tell) without major radical restructuring of how we distribute wealth. I'd say the odds of that happening are pretty slim.

>I'm not sure what the mechanism would be for this- it seems like the last 100 years have been solidly trending toward greater and greater wealth inequality, with a brief hiatus caused by new deal policies and the great depression.

The mechanism would be lower supply of labor relative to demand.

And many, many people have experienced increases in quality of life and increases in the wealth. It just happened to come close the gap with the middle in developed countries, not the richest.

Covid has really taken its toll on the world

I really do think that there are large parts of the world that are working on the edge. What I mean by that is people that are either struggling to make ends meet, dealing with too much stress and/or struggling with mental health as a result.

As a result COVID is pushing people over the edge and making them choose taking a break or prioritising their health.

I know that's highly generalised but I think COVID and its associated impacts for some, have been the straw that broke the camel's back so to speak.

In my own family I have a few cousins who have been living on debt and skating by and I think the bill is gonna come due. It's hard to feel bad for them because they've been spending everything they earn on jet skis and ski vacations to Montana and just kind of keeping up with the Jones of their peer group but it certainly seems kind of like 2006 before the mortgage crisis and that many people might be having to downsize their lifestyle due to economic factors.

There is of course a different in 'lifestyle'/'downsizing' and not making enough money to survive working 16 hours a day. That last category might as well be some pervasive form of modern slavery, but it all ends up with people living 'on the edge' in various forms. All it takes is one big thing that happens to a lot of 'on the edge' people and the bottom of society falls out.

The solution seems rather obvious: don't construct a society where a large amount of people are forced to live on the edge while at the same time pretending they are replaceable. Once replacements run out (like is happening right now), we suddenly lost something we apparently depended on as not-on-the-edge consumers.

I know right?? See https://www.clevernero.com/adobe-us-employees-have-until-dec...

My wife has multiple friends that just flat out lost their minds during Covid. Some have walked out in their families, others have gone down the conspiracy spiral and others have just kind of checked out of life. I think many more people than you think do indeed live on the edge.

It's "weird" to see how some people respond to crisis in a self-destructive way. Covid is showing a glimpse of what humanity is really like, underneath the veneer of modernity.

Imagine what happens if there is news of an extinction-level asteroid about to hit the earth. Responding to a real crisis like that might end humanity before the event occurs!

Absolutely agree! We all kind've follow this path of what we think will make us happy and when those boundaries start to crumble down or push us too far, I think we re-evaluate what really makes us happy. And potentially if you have been impacted, it gives us the excuse to change and jump off the so called rat race.

Is that a lot? What’s a normal number

You can go to the BLS JOLTS home page.

https://www.bls.gov/jlt/

It's better to talk about percent of labor force, given that the size of the labor force grows over time.

A quits rate of 2.7% is high -- it's a series high, but the series only goes back to 2000, which means we just have two business cycle peaks to compare against.

This gives you a better view:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSQUR

Quits rates peak around business cycle peaks -- people don't quit during downturns, obviously. So in the last two peaks, the quit rate was 2.2% at the peak before the Great Recession, and 2.4% at the peak of the pre-covid recession, so this cycle is at 2.7% now. Looks like the quit rate is increasing, but interestingly, the layoff rate is decreasing, so that total turnover is not high at all.

But we have a screwy labor market at the moment, particularly in restaurants and hospitality, which is driving this number. It will be interesting to see what happens once we get out of the lockdown situation and things settle down.

So overall pretty tame then.

Thanks for posting the links!

I wonder how much may be due to LongCovid. If even 10% of infections result in LongCovid then I would expect to see it in job reports.

If you follow r/antiwork on Reddit, the general trend seems to be people realising they have been put into a hamster wheel with crappy pay and no real future. Maybe some of that is due covid making people revaluate their lives, who knows.

I belive long covid is a thing, I know people who were unable to work for a long time after much less serious health issues. But I'm not sure if long covid is a major factor here.

probably due to the mandates

I see people walking out on their jobs out here because they are getting hit with omg covid and getting things like dementia and other severe covid after effects that have disabled them

I don't think its a Covid after effect. Don't continue memeing that. I suggest this is just what social isolation and economic depression does to memory and cognitive processing.

there was a study from a German national healthcare provider (BARMER) that said that 7% of the people who had covid were ill (and not working) still 3 months after infection. This would mean that the amount of people who still had lingering effects but working would be higher (well, especially in the US) so these long covid effects shouldn't be entirely dismissed regarding labor figures. However, I agree they are only one part of a bigger picture.

https://www.spiegel.de/gesundheit/corona-fast-jeder-fuenfte-...

I believe that people are trying simply trying to meme this into reality, and its not A priori true that Covid has this effect on people. This belief goes as deep as what I believe to be humanities' true existential nature.

You respond to a study with "your belief". That's... not a convincing response.

At first you think it doesn't matter, and then you realize its the only thing that matters. God/Buddha mind/Universe/Dao created the game, but humans created a whole lot too.

There is a stress that comes from isolation and change in what was "normal" for life. That directly leads to things like social isolation, economic impacts for some, etc. There is a cause and effect that comes from being in a pandemic.

It doesn't help that places like the US are filled with idiots open to taking random drugs peddled by right wing media. But I'd generalize, the the general US being one of the few countries that allows rampant drug ads on most media and allows doctors to reap from recommendations of certain drugs.

The real virus is a total breakdown in our cohesion as a species. I can't be certain that certain drugs don't work, or are safe, but I do know there are many people who have a significant pieces of the national trust with completely opposite opinions, who are in life-or-death stake arguments with people.

How can we deal with living in a society which feels it is post truth? Humans rely on consensus, but if the consensus mechanisms are blatantly failing, we have very little ability to sense the actual truth of things.

It's just easier to avoid discussions. It's stupid that people who can be completely rational about most things become someone different around certain topics. Spending most of my time in a county in CA that 55-60% are pro conspiracy theory, it's just easier to avoid certain topics.

The struggle is that some of what we think is reality is actually not reality. What I learned is its only a conspiracy theory if you don't believe it /right now/. And what you believe right now is highly influenced by your culture, parents and media. In a Nietzscheian sense, I have had to start from ground zero, about what I believe, and derive understandings through direct experience of nature. Unfortunately this is slower than consensus, so I also choose to trust sources on non-political topics such as math, physics, and construction/engineering.

These days I look back on how much I used to think was truth, and I later came to a realization that it was actually illusion... I don't take much as blind fact these days, and try to stick close to things I can easily understand and get immediate feedback on, such as math, engineering and growing plants. Unfortunately, since so much of my life also consists of economy and psychology, I can't completely ignore the facets of reality out of my control.

At least when people tell me they actually believe in a conspiracy theory, they can give me some pre-formatted viewpoint which I cant test their premises against.

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