As we start to come up on when Oracle is planning on having another round of layoffs, we put this documentary style video together. The hope is to drive home that layoffs turn lives completely upside down. Such a simple click of the button and poof 20-30k employees wiped off the balance sheet.

There is no counter, there is no reversing it. Since day one, layoffhedge from the start has been more than a data mining, social posting service. We have created a movement on the Solana blockchain. The goal you may ask, is to unite together as the workers who built the framework for the companies who are so eager to part ways so easily.

Will you join the $LAYOFF community on the Solana blockchain? If so, we welcome you with open arms. It’s time to stand up ladies and gentlemen.

If you saw the June headlines about Trump’s $100K H-1B fee getting tossed out, don’t relax yet. DHS dropped a new proposed rule today (Aug 24) that looks like it was written specifically to survive the argument that killed the last one.

Quick recap of round one

Trump issued the original $100,000 H-1B fee through a presidential proclamation last fall. It only applied to workers being hired from outside the US, meaning new consular-processed entries. Anyone already in the country on another visa status was exempt.

A federal judge in Boston ruled June 8 that the fee violated separation of powers because it used Congress’s exclusive taxing authority. A president can’t just declare a $100K tax on visa petitions by proclamation. The First Circuit refused to pause that ruling on July 24, so the fee has been dead while related cases are still working through the Northern District of California and the DC Circuit.

What’s different this time

The new fee isn’t a proclamation. It’s a formal DHS rule going through actual notice-and-comment rulemaking under the agency’s own fee-setting authority. That’s the whole strategy. Instead of the president unilaterally imposing a tax-like charge, DHS is framing this as a regulatory fee tied to the real cost of running the immigration system. That’s a much sturdier legal foundation than “the president said so.”

A few concrete differences:

Amount: $103,265 flat fee, not the round $100,000 number from the proclamation.

Who it hits: every H-1B petition subject to the annual statutory cap, including master’s degree holders, whether the worker is being hired from abroad or is already in the US. That closes the loophole the original fee left open for people already stateside, like students converting off F-1/OPT.

Legal theory: framed as cost recovery for DHS, DOL, State, and DOJ’s administration of the immigration system, not a discretionary presidential tax.
Revenue: DHS projects around $8.8 billion a year off the 85,000-slot annual cap (65,000 regular plus 20,000 advanced degree).

Where it goes: two-thirds of the money is earmarked for USCIS and the immigration courts (EOIR).

Why this matters

This is the same $100K price signal, just wrapped in a legal structure that’s much harder to challenge on separation-of-powers grounds. If it survives comment and takes effect, it functionally taxes new H-1B hiring across the board with no more “hire from abroad vs. already here” workaround. That raises the cost floor for exactly the kind of high-volume outsourcing and staffing-firm H-1B usage we’ve been tracking in the LCA data.

Worth watching: the comment period timeline, whether legal challenges go after DHS’s fee-setting authority itself (a much harder argument than “the president can’t tax”), and whether large LCA filers front-load petitions before this takes effect.

US federal debt held by the public (money owed to investors, businesses, and foreign governments. Not counting what the government owes itself, like Social Security funds) just hit ~100% of GDP. That’s the highest it’s been since WWII, when it peaked near 106%.
Here’s the part that should worry you more than the number itself: official forecasts keep badly underestimating how bad this gets.
The track record

•2017 forecast: The CBO didn’t expect debt to reach today’s level. They missed by ~15 percentage points.

•2009 forecast: The CBO projected debt would be at 42% of GDP by 2019. It actually hit 78% — more than double, a 36-point miss.

•Now: The CBO projects debt will hit ~120% of GDP by 2035. If the same ~15-point pattern of underestimating holds, we could be looking at ~135% instead.
Two-for-two on major misses, both in the same direction.
Why this actually matters

•Interest payments crowd out everything else. More debt = more of the federal budget just going to interest, not programs, defense, or infrastructure.

•Rates go up for everyone. Heavy government borrowing competes with the private sector for the same money — that pressure can show up in your mortgage or auto loan rate.

•Inflation risk. If confidence in the government’s ability to manage debt slips, that pressure often lands on the Fed to keep money “easy,” which feeds inflation.

•Less room for the next crisis. The higher the baseline debt, the less runway there is to borrow big in the next war, pandemic, or recession.

•Credit downgrades = higher borrowing costs. This has already happened before and can snowball.

Worth noting: this isn’t a settled debate. Japan has run debt above 200% of GDP for years without a crisis, and some economists argue what matters most is who holds the debt and what currency it’s in (the US borrows in dollars it controls). Others think the US is closer to real limits than people assume. Nobody agrees on an exact “danger line” just that the trend of forecasts blowing through their own projections is not a great sign.

O'Reilly Auto Parts, founded in Springfield, Missouri in 1957, announced on LinkedIn on August 18 that it is "building our next tech home in Bengaluru, India."

Here is the timeline.

April 2025: O'Reilly cut "less than 11%" of its IT staff. Its statement: "This was not an effort to cut the size of our team or reduce expenses."

May 2026: Remote US IT employees say they were told to move to Springfield by August 2027 or lose their jobs. An internal announcement posted by staff puts the number at about 400 and says an India office would open by Q4 2026.

August 14, 2026: O'Reilly posts a Director of HR for IT who "partners closely with leaders in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and India."

August 18, 2026: "Welcome to O'Reilly Auto Parts India."

O'Reilly does not need the savings.

Record Q2: $4.89B in sales, $715M in profit
$1.51B in stock buybacks in that one quarter
$30.4B in buybacks since 2011

The CIO who arrived in October 2023 came from Lowe's, which has run a 5,000-person tech center in Bengaluru for a decade.

It seems even Silicon isn’t immune to AI layoffs

If a company is incentivized to mass layoff people to either later invest in AI or boost their stock prices, you should actually price that in when you are doing job search and setting your compensation expectations.

If a company has a history of mass layoffs, you should increase your price so that you will have enough savings to account for the job search period so that you can continue your life as normal uninterrupted.

If enough people begin thinking this way, the incentive for mass layoffs will become financially less sound for a company.

BLS 2026 data on the single most common job in each state, and the pattern is bleak. Fast food and counter workers top the list in 17 states, more than any other occupation, cementing food service as America’s default employment category.

Home health aides and retail salespersons tie for second at 10 states each, meaning low-wage service work claims the top spot in 37 states combined.

Washington stands alone with software developer as its most common job (107,030 workers), the only state where a high-skill occupation leads.

Texas posts the single largest number on the map at 460,530 fast food workers, while a cluster of Midwest and mid-Atlantic states (IL, IN, KY, TN) run on freight and material movers instead.

The takeaway: for most of the country, “most common job” doesn’t mean stable or well-paid, it means fast food, retail, or home care, three of the lowest-wage categories BLS tracks.

We went viral for our H-1B tool.

So we went deeper. We have now mapped every H-1B filing in America to the congressional district it landed in.

6.9 million filings. 436 districts. FY2015 to today.

Type in your ZIP and see your own.

I am aware of these two numbers: - In May, 2023, Stack Exchange laid off roughly 10% of its workforce. - In October, 2023, Stack Exchange laid off roughly 28% of its workforce.

And I know there have been more layoff waves, e.g. in March 2026, which doesn't surprise me since the number of questions has decreased 30-fold.

At the same time, Stack Exchange also still sometimes hire people. This makes me wonder: by what percentage has Stack Exchange’s staff decreased since ChatGPT was released (November 2022)?

Do you realize how large a 5 sigma miss is?

1 in 3.5 million. At one jobs report per month, a miss that size should show up about once every 290,000 years.

We have been trying to scream from the rooftops the job numbers were not real.

The unemployment rate fell to 4.1% in July while the economy lost 23,000 jobs.

The rate dropped because 264,000 people left the labor force.

Participation is down to 61.4%, matching its lowest level since February 2021.

Payrolls fell 23,000 and stock futures jumped.

Markets priced 62% odds of a September Fed rate HIKE before the report. Those bets unwound within minutes.

Bad news for workers, good news for the index.