Agreed...sort of. It's definitely a recession. No question there for me.

Again, I think my opinions of things have been warped by the fact that my HR person is CONSTANTLY harping on us looking for new hires, and we seem to be always just on the edge of under-staffed, but not quite - we're "well utilized" in the parlance of the HR folks.

But that's in my industry, at my company, in New York City.

Back home, some folks (admittedly not terribly BRIGHT folks) are throwing around terms like "it's a depression, for sure" as if they have the slightest CLUE what a depression is like.

You see, some of my co-workers fled Russia in the early 1990's, as the Soviet Union collapsed, and they have told me of what an economic collapse is all about. It's not about a low-paying job, it's about going to the park, near the playground where your kids used to play, and cutting down the trees for fuel so those same kids don't freeze to death in the winter. It's about feeding a family from canned beans once a day, every day, for a year. It's about rushing to the sink to collect water during the 2 hours a day the power is on. This from a guy who's father was an established computer programmer in the USSR's space program, a man who, once he lost his job at the age of 61, never worked full time again until he died (at the age of 67). That's a collapse. What we're having now is an annoyance by comparison. Americans don't know what hardship is, I don't know what it is.