If you've hunted for a job in the past decade or so, you've likely encountered the following obstacle course. Applying to a desired role online, you're greeted with a login prompt. The employer is asking you to create a profile to apply? Annoying, but you go ahead.

You're given a long form to fill out with the information that's already on your résumé. In a world where we can all attach PDFs, this seems unnecessary, but — ah, phew — the form promises to autofill the entries if you simply drag your résumé over, and — oh, crap. It loads all wrong. Your work experience is scattered across the lines that want your name and address. Your address, truncated, is where your college degree should be. It's a mess. You find it's easier to delete it all and manually type in each entry. How obnoxious.

Soon after, applying to a different job at a different company, you click through and see the same form. You recognize the logo at the top of the page: a blue W with a yellow arch cresting above it. Is the arch a … frown? Geez. But you'd set up a user ID to apply to the previous job, so this should be — huh? It wants an entirely new ID. New company, new profile, new form. Oof. Surely it saved your application entries from the other job, right? Nope. Does the autofill work this time? Of course it doesn't. Another half-hour of formatting and you're done with the application — and so done with whichever confounding organization decided to execute these tasks this way.

Then you find another job opening and — no. No! So the logo is a frown.

The company devising this torture that is the modern job application is called Workday. Since 2006, Workday, which provides software for payroll, talent management, and expense processing, has been making a mint creating misery where painless processes could be. More than half of the Fortune 500 companies use Workday to pay, hire, onboard, and administer benefits to their employees. Clients range from Netflix to Goodwill, Spotify to The Washington Post, Chick-fil-A to Ohio State University. Trillions of dollars in revenue and tens of millions of employees are at the mercy of Workday's back-end people-management software. The company is worth some $70 billion, a market cap greater than that of FedEx, Nintendo, or Honda.

LinkedIn, Reddit, and Blind abound with enraged job applicants and employees sharing tales of how difficult it is to book leave, how Kafkaesque it is to file an expense.

Few seem happy about this. LinkedIn, Reddit, and Blind abound with enraged job applicants and employees sharing tales of how difficult it is to book paid leave, how Kafkaesque it is to file an expense, how nerve-racking it is to close out a project. "I simply hate Workday. Fuck them and those who insist on using it for recruitment," one Reddit user wrote. "Everything is non-intuitive, so even the simplest tasks leave me scratching my head," wrote another. "Keeping notes on index cards would be more effective." Every HR professional and hiring manager I spoke with — whose lives are supposedly made easier by Workday — described Workday with a sense of cosmic exasperation. "It's like constantly being botsmacked by bureaucracy incarnate," said a copy director at an AI startup in San Francisco who had the misfortune of having to hire contractors through Workday. He went on: "Getting someone onboarded using Workday is like trying to get water from your sink to your stove using a colander." The X account Work Day Failing tracks memes and news articles describing workers and companies suffering within various circles of Workday hell, from Amazon's failed migration to Workday in 2021 (after which Workday's stock dropped by 7%) to an ongoing class-action lawsuit that alleges Workday uses AI to discriminate against candidates based on race, age, and disability. ("We believe this lawsuit is without merit and deny the allegations," said a Workday spokesperson. "Workday does not have oversight or control of our customers' job application processes.")

If candidates hate Workday, if employees hate Workday, if HR people and managers processing and assessing those candidates and employees through Workday hate Workday — if Workday is the most annoying part of so many workers' workdays — how is Workday everywhere? How did a software provider so widely loathed become a mainstay of the modern workplace?

The answer, to use a term that any client of Workday could surely use, is POSIWID. This is a saying in systems thinking: The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID), not what it fails to do. And the reality is that what Workday — and its many despised competitors — does for organizations is far more important than the anguish it causes everyone else.

Of the 160 million Americans with jobs, about 130 million of us aren't self-employed or don't own a business and so receive wages and health-insurance plans through our employers. Serving these 130 million people are roughly 1 million human-resources professionals. That's an impossible shit ton of hirings, firings, withheld taxes, expenses, paid leaves, orientation trainings, and professional-growth reviews to keep track of. It's a world of paperwork that software is eager to eat.

In the late 20th century, companies moved more and more of that recordkeeping from filing cabinets to mainframe computers and then to servers. In 1988, PeopleSoft, backed by IBM, built the first fully fledged Human Resources Information System. In 2004, Oracle acquired PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion. One of its founders, David Duffield, then started a new company that upgraded PeopleSoft's model to near limitless cloud-based storage — giving birth to Workday, the intractable nepo baby of HR software.

Unlike its predecessors, Workday stores our applications and profiles as objects that relate to each other, linked with metadata. How this works is less important than the fact that it means Workday could conceivably build its own encrypted database of our information, across our different jobs and applications. When you leave Spotify to go work at Netflix, your profile could follow you, allowing you to more easily apply to the job. The multiplying powers of tech could scale to free us of our busy work, as promised.

But Workday's servers belong with its clients, and so it can't (or won't) do this. Does Workday want to carry the liability of a data breach that could damage half of the Fortune 500? Probably not. A Workday spokesperson said that Workday's clients "configure the application process for each job to fit their unique hiring processes and needs." She added, "Our customers retain control over their own data."

This raises another point: Workday is indifferent to our suffering in a job hunt, because we aren't Workday's clients, companies are. And these companies — from AT&T to Bank of America to Teladoc — have little incentive to care about your application experience, because if you didn't get the job, you're not their responsibility. For a company hiring and onboarding on a global scale, it is simply easier to screen fewer candidates if the result is still a single hire.

Also, because Workday is a jack of all trades program (recruiting and finance and company-wide planning etc. etc.), the supposed convenience of an all-in-one platform often come at the cost of creating frustrating new problems for clients. At one major university last year, migrating its IT — including 11,000 outstanding invoices — to Workday became a full-blown fiasco. A search on a job board can return hundreds of listings for in-house Workday consultants: IT and engineering professionals hired to fix the software promising to fix processes.

Bureaucratic hell is always about one person's ease coming at the cost of someone else's frustration, time wasted, and busy work.

For recruiters, Workday also lacks basic user-interface flexibility. When you promise ease-of-use and simplicity, you must deliver on the most basic user interactions. And yet: Sometimes searching for a candidate, or locating a candidate's status feels impossible. This happens outside of recruiting, too, where locating or attaching a boss's email to approve an expense sheet is complicated by the process, not streamlined. Bureaucratic hell is always about one person's ease coming at the cost of someone else's frustration, time wasted, and busy work. Workday makes no exceptions.

Workday touts its ability to track employee performance by collecting data and marking results, but it is employees who must spend time inputting this data. A creative director at a Fortune 500 company told me how in less than two years his company went "from annual reviews to twice-annual reviews to quarterly reviews to quarterly reviews plus separate twice-annual reviews." At each interval higher-ups pressed HR for more data, because they wanted what they'd paid for with Workday: more work product. With a press of a button, HR could provide that, but the entire company suffered thousands more hours of busy work. Automation made it too easy to do too much. (Workday's "customers choose the frequency at which they conduct reviews, not Workday," said the spokesperson.)

Of course, Workday has innumerable competitors, their names as ridiculous as their sheer volume. We have Dayforce, Zenefits, and Sage. We must not confuse Paycom with Paycor, or Kudos with Kudoboard. How dare you mistake Namely or Cornerstone for Rippling. Beyond standard HR Information Systems, legions of niche operators offer add-ons to boost employee engagement, from Bonusly (really) to BucketList (sad but true), to Motivosity (yes).

Are any of these better, or are they all maligned? As easily as you can find a founder who hates UKG Pro but loves Rippling you can find a similar rant from another founder ripping Rippling a new one. HR and payroll and recruiting are unenviable tasks, and not easy even before scale. At the scale of a large company, this is simply too much work to expect a few people to do and far too user-specific to expect automation to handle well. It's why Workday can be the worst while still allowing that Paychex is the worst, Paycom is the worst, Paycor is the worst, and Dayforce is the worst. "HR software sucking" is a big tent.

The writer and tech critic Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to describe how internet platforms inevitably decay. First, platforms are good to their users, creating value (Facebook, where people can connect and share their lives with one another). Then they abuse their users to make money for their actual customers, advertisers or businesses (Facebook, where we sell your data to inundate you with ads). Then they abuse those business customers to try to recoup revenue for themselves (Facebook, pivoting to video). Then platforms die.

Workday finds itself between enshittification steps two and three. The platform once made things faster, simpler for workers. But today it abuses workers by cutting corners on job-application and reimbursement procedures. In the process, it provides the value of a one-stop HR shop to its paying customers. It seems it's only a matter of time before Workday and its competitors try to split the difference and cut those same corners with the accounts that pay their bills.

Workday reveals what's important to the people who run Fortune 500 companies: easily and conveniently distributing busy work across large workforces. This is done with the arbitrary and perfunctory performance of work tasks (like excessive reviews) and with the throttling of momentum by making finance and HR tasks difficult. If your expenses and reimbursements are difficult to file, that's OK, because the people above you don't actually care if you get reimbursed. If it takes applicants 128% longer to apply, the people who implemented Workday don't really care. Throttling applicants is perhaps not intentional, but it's good for the company.

Customer service is Workday's goal. It's just that the customer isn't you.

I once worked at a cocktail lounge with a creaky board behind the bar, and the owner refused to fix it. We all complained nonstop about the board, but never about him. He'd seemed to realize the same net benefit that Workday and all of its love-to-hate-them competitors provide us in the modern workplace: Nothing brings people together like a common enemy.

Matt Alston's writing has appeared in Wired, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Believer. He trained as a civil engineer, and now works as a copywriter in tech. He lives in Maine with his wife and daughter.

• Diners are "price weary" and eating out less often, restaurant executives told investors last week.
• One analyst said Starbucks posted its "weakest" performance outside the pandemic or Great Recession.
• A number of chains said they'd be more careful with price hikes this year.

Many consumers are thinking carefully about how they spend every dollar, with some cutting back on visits to quick-service restaurants, executives told investors on a series of earnings calls last week. To win penny-pinching customers back, some say they're planning smaller price increases for the rest of the year.

Many fast-food chains described a gloomy outlook. Wendy's CFO Gunther Plosch told investors on Thursday that consumers are "still under pressure" — especially those with household incomes under $75,000. "They are reducing frequency, so visitation is down."

Chains raised prices drastically during the pandemic to offset rising labor and food costs, and it's coming back to bite them. Some diners are cutting back, saying that fast food is just too expensive and no longer represents good value.

McDonald's CFO Ian Borden told investors that consumers were "price weary" and "certainly" dining out less often. Joshua Kobza, the CEO of RBI, which owns brands including Burger King and Popeyes, told analysts that diners had become "a bit more sensitive to price."

Chains including McDonald's, Burger King, Shake Shack, and Wendy's posted sluggish US comparable sales, with a poor growth rate compared to what they posted in the first quarter last year, driven by a decrease in the number of orders.

For some restaurant chains, comparable sales even fell. Starbucks posted a 3% drop in North America comparable sales, which it attributed to a 7% fall in the number of transactions. William Blair analyst Sharon Zackfia said in a note to clients that it was the "weakest traffic performance at Starbucks outside the pandemic or the Great Recession."

Global comparable sales also fell in the first three months of the year for both KFC (down 2%) and Pizza Hut (a 7% decline), compared with the same period in 2023.

Some chains, though, including Popeyes, Domino's, and Wingstop, posted a growth in same-restaurant sales.

Pricing caution

Before the pandemic, limited-service restaurants in the US put their prices up by less than 3% a year on average, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows. That all changed during the pandemic, and while it's now cooling, price inflation is still well above pre-2020 levels.

Some chains last week vowed to keep price increases low this year, though many noted that California's new $20-an-hour minimum wage for fast-food workers had pushed up prices there.

"We're going to stay careful on pricing," Plosch, the Wendy's CFO, said. "We are expecting low-single digit pricing that the system is going to execute this year. I don't think we're going to get too greedy."

McDonald's would "certainly" be "prudent and thoughtful" about any further price increases in the rest of 2024, Borden said.

Shake Shack went one step further. CFO Katie Fogertey told investors on Thursday that the chain, which has raised prices by in the mid-single digits this year, had no further increases planned for 2024.

Is fast food now too expensive? Contact this reporter at gdean@businessinsider.com

• Amazon has more than doubled its warehouse robot fleet in the past three years.
• The robots, with varying functions, are designed to boost efficiency and reduce strain on employees.
• It's gone from having 350,000 robots in 2021 to 750,000 in 2023, company blog posts show.

Amazon has ramped up its fleet of robots in recent years to boost its warehouse operations.

It's more than doubled the number of robots deployed in its fulfillment centers and warehouses in the last three years, from 350,000 in 2021 to 750,000 by last June, data from its blog posts show. The company also claims to be the world's largest manufacturer of industrial robots.

Amazon has a whole bunch of robots with unusual names that it uses in its operations. Robotic arms Robin and Sparrow were designed and manufactured at its Robotics Innovation Hub near Boston and help sort customer orders.

Then there are robots Proteus and Hercules, which move and look like the robot vacuum Roomba and shift items such as containers. Its robotic system called Sequoia lifts and sorts containers and eases the strain on employees to bend and stretch, Amazon Robotics' chief technologist Tye Brady told NBC's "Today."

The company also started testing Agility Robotics' humanoid robot called Digit in warehouses last year.

The expansion shows Amazon is bullish on robots, and it's a bet that seems to be paying off.

The company says Sequoia helps identify and store inventory 75% faster and reduces the time needed to process orders by up to a quarter. At its Robotics sites, recorded incident rates and lost-time incident rates (how often injuries occur at work and the rate it's resulted in time away from work) were down 15% and 18%, respectively, in 2022 compared with non-Robotics sites.

Robots have been talked up by robotics firms as a solution to help ease labor shortages and perform "the dull, the dirty, and the dangerous" tasks, as Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas previously told Business Insider.

Amazon's robot army is still significantly smaller than its employee total, which stood at 1.525 million full-time and part-time workers at the end of last year, per its annual report. However, the company has been cutting jobs in its cloud division, Amazon Web Services, this year.

Agility Robotics president Damion Shelton previously told BI that its robots are intended to complement and elevate the productivity of workers.

Stefano La Rovere, director of global robotics, mechatronics, and sustainable packaging at Amazon, told CNBC that "robots and technology help our employees … by reducing walking distance between assignments, by taking away repetitive motions, or helping them to lift heavy weights."

And despite fears that robots and technology could replace workers, the opposite has been true, La Rovere told the outlet: "Over the last years, more than 700 new categories of jobs have been created by the use of technology."

Amazon didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Official NBER recession data says US recessions have become less common over time. 
• But some economists have argued that flawed historical economic data puts this claim in question.  
• A variety of factors should be making the US economy more recession-proof than it used to be. 

One of the biggest questions of today's economy is when the US will enter a recession. And most Americans are crossing their fingers it won't happen anytime soon.

During recessions, many people lose their jobs — and those who don't are left worrying about whether they'll be next on the chopping block. Recessions often cause businesses to close and stock portfolios to plummet, and they can have a lingering impact on workers' employment and wages, even years after a downturn has officially ended.

So, over the last few years, when experts predicted that the US would soon enter a recession, many Americans worried about their financial security. While a downturn hasn't come yet — and some economic indicators remain strong — recession fears haven't gone away.

While it's unclear if the US will experience a recession in the near future, data from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) — the private, nonprofit research group that's responsible for tracking the start and end dates of US recessions — shows a promising trend: Recessions have become less common in the US.

Between 1990 and 2023, the US economy spent 36 months in a recession, with the most recent US recession in 2020 lasting two months. The NBER defines a recession as the period between a peak of economic activity and its lowest point — the period typically must include a "significant decline in economic activity" that lasts more than a few months.

Between 1960 and 1989, the economy spent 59 months in a recession. The further back you go — the NBER data goes to about 1850 — the more common recessions were.

But here's where things get a bit complicated.

The NBER's recession data between roughly 1850 and 1950 is somewhere between flawed and unusable, George Selgin, an economist and a senior fellow at the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, told Business Insider. He said the NBER's pre-1914 recession data, in particular, is "very poor," and that only economic data collected after World War II is of good quality.

For example, while some efforts were made to track unemployment as early as the 1870s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics didn't officially do so until 1929.

This raises a series of questions: Are US recessions, in fact, much less common than they used to be? If so, who or what is responsible for this improvement?

And if not, what's gone wrong? After all, economists told BI that the US's diversifying economy and improving economic data should have made the US more resistant to recessions than perhaps ever before.

Recessions might not be less common

It's possible that NBER worked with subpar data but generally was able to identify when the US entered a recession.

However, Selgin said alternative analyses of historical economic data have found that the US hasn't seen much of a decline in recession frequency over time. Selgin pointed to a research paper published in 2005 by Joseph H. Davis, now the global chief economist at Vanguard, as the "most reliable" source of recession data he's seen.

Davis's research put more emphasis on economic output and employment and less on prices, which can tell a misleading story, Selgin said. For example, while prices fell during the late 1800s, this didn't mean there was necessarily a recession.

"What Davis and other economic historians have shown is that much of the deflation, not all of it during those times, was driven by productivity gains."

Ultimately, Davis's research concluded that US recessions might not be as common historically as previously thought — casting doubt on the premise that recessions have become much less common over time.

While Davis's recession data only dates back to around 2000, Selgin said incorporating more recent data points, like the Great Recession, would only reinforce the paper's findings.

The US economy is more resilient because it has diversified

In some ways, the US economy is arguably more stable than it was 100 years ago. Agriculture's declining share of the economy is among the primary reasons. In 1935, there were about 6.8 million farms in the US, per the US Department of Agriculture. In 2023, there were 1.9 million.

"A bad harvest for one or two crops or a drought season, that could give you a big downturn," Selgin said. "That doesn't happen in a diversified manufacturing economy, of course, where much of the GDP has nothing to do with the weather."

The ongoing transition from a manufacturing economy to a services-oriented one could be making the US even more resilient, Satyam Panday, Chief US Economist, S&P Global Ratings, told Business Insider.

"The most volatile is agriculture, then manufacturing, and services is the most stable," he said of economies with a particular industry focus. "So the growing share of services also means you're going to have more stable economic growth."

Additionally, Selgin said that growing US government spending relative to GDP over the past century could also be making the economy more stable. In part, that's because government spending doesn't tend to plummet during difficult economic periods.

Becoming more energy-independent may have helped as well. Before 2018, when the US exported more oil than it imported for the first time in 75 years, a huge spike in oil prices outside the US could seriously impact the economy, Panday said. Today, the US should be more insulated from such a price shock.

But if recessions aren't much less common than they used to be, and the aforementioned developments should be making the economy more stable, where would the instability be coming from?

Selgin isn't sure what the explanation is, but he thinks it's possible that the Federal Reserve, which was founded in 1913, could be partly responsible.

"The Fed tends to overdo things sometimes, and others, it underdoes things, even though, in general, it's getting the directions right," he said of the central bank's interest rate policies. "There's plenty of reason to not be complacent about the Fed's performance, to wonder whether it has really done what it set out to do when it was established."

The Fed is tasked with helping the economy maintain maximum employment and stable prices. Since 2022, the Fed has raised interest rates in an effort to bring down inflation, and it's pursuing the desired "soft landing" of lower prices and a healthy labor market. Its policies may have helped the US avoid a recession.

Panday said he believes that better economic data and the ability to "learn from the mistakes of the past" have helped the Fed make better decisions.

Avoiding recessions isn't the only indicator of a healthy economy

The longer the US economy grows without a recession, the better it is for employment and Americans' standard of living, Panday said. But when it comes to measuring the stability of the US economy, measuring the frequency of recessions might not be the best approach.

Even when a recession technically comes to an end, and the US economy begins to grow again, that doesn't mean everything is fine and dandy. For example, the US exited a recession in 2009, but employment didn't return to pre-recession levels until 2014.

It's why economists should focus not only on the frequency of recessions but on the pace of the economic recoveries in the aftermath, Selgin said.

Panday said he thinks policymakers' response to the pandemic recession — which included trillions in federal COVID-19 spending — shows that they may have learned the lesson from the sluggish recovery after the Great Recession.

To be sure, while a stable economy has its benefits, it's not the only indicator of a healthy economy. For example, Americans' standard of living has improved considerably over the past century thanks in part to a growing economy and technological progress, even though they've dealt with the occasional recession.

In the years and decades ahead, any number of factors could plunge the US into a downturn.

A long economic expansion could raise the risk of the economy "running too hot," Panday said — which could ultimately lay the groundwork for a recession if policymakers don't respond correctly. He added that the growth of the financial sector relative to the rest of the economy could pose risks if it's not properly regulated. And of course, unexpected global shocks to supply and demand — the pandemic being the most recent example — could wreak havoc.

To some Americans, the next recession might feel inevitable. But Panday said that isn't necessarily true.

"Economic expansions don't die of old age just because of time," he said. "Even if it's been going on for a long time, it doesn't mean that you're going to get a recession."

Have you changed your spending or savings strategies over the past few years because you feared a recession was on the horizon? If so, reach out to this reporter at jzinkula@businessinsider.com.

• Cheryl Simmons, a parking lot attendant, lives in her car but makes too much for affordable housing.
• Despite earning $42,000 annually, Simmons cannot afford rent and barely has savings left over.
• Many 'peak boomers' are not financially ready for retirement, with 52.5% having under $250,000 in assets.

Cheryl Simmons, 62, thinks she'll have to "work until I drop."

Simmons, who works as a parking lot attendant in San Diego, has struggled with homelessness on and off for years, even though she's maintained jobs throughout much of that time. She lives in her car, even though she makes about $42,000 a year. She and her son previously lived in an efficiency apartment since it was all they could afford.

She makes slightly too much for a single-room occupancy unit in affordable housing and exceeds the income limit for food stamps and other government assistance. She believes she's fallen through the cracks and thinks she'll never be able to retire or live comfortably.

"I don't have somewhere for my grandchildren to come and visit, and I always have to go and visit them. But maybe that's the way it's supposed to be," Simmons said.

Simmons is one of the 30 million "peak boomers" entering retirement age in the next few years, but most are not financially prepared to retire. These boomers, born between 1959 and 1964, are facing economic challenges some have called the boomer retirement bomb.

A new report from the Alliance for Lifetime Income's Retirement Income Institute found that 52.5% of peak boomers have below $250,000 in assets. Many of these boomers will have to drain their savings or heavily rely on Social Security income after retiring — with many having to continue working into their 70s, at least in part-time roles.

Simmons also exemplifies the 29% of the country who fall into the category of ALICE — or Americans who are asset-limited, income-constrained, and employed. ALICE Americans make enough income to be above the Federal Poverty Level but too much to afford essential costs. Most earn too much to qualify for government assistance, falling through the cracks of the nation's safety net. The share of ALICEs has risen over the last decade nationwide.

Navigating homelessness

Simmons was born and raised in Albuquerque and had her first child at 22. She was a single mother with no college education and worked in entry-level office and fast-food roles. She later enrolled in community college courses in accounting.

She got married to her first husband, and they had two children together. She ultimately left the marriage, although she experienced homelessness after their divorce.

Because her son wanted to move to San Diego, she followed him 13 years ago with little money or belongings. She got into a shelter while her son looked for work. After both eventually found jobs, they moved into a studio apartment for $1,300 a month that she said was smaller than a hotel room. She also bought a car, which she's still paying off.

Her current job as a parking lot attendant pays her about $1,200 every other week after taxes. Much of that goes toward her car, insurance payments, and gas, which averages $5.39 a gallon in California.

Her son lost his job, and the two were forced to give up their apartment. Her son lives in the car with his cat, while she rents an SUV from a former coworker and sleeps in the back.

She said her company has offered to pay $1,000 toward a security deposit and other expenses on an apartment, though she said she can't cover monthly rent.

"I am OK sleeping in the car, and I don't need a whole lot. But it would be nice to have a bathroom in the middle of the night and a refrigerator," Simmons said.

Worried about retirement

She said she has no savings, as her earnings have mostly gone toward expenses and housing during more stable periods. Her car payment is $274 a month, while her insurance is $111. Her son's car is about $600 a month, though he pays the insurance. She estimates gas is $80 a week between the two cars, while her phone bill runs her $150 a month. Since she can't cook food, she spends about $30 a day on food. Other expenses include $84 a month for storage, as well as some other debts.

"We can't be happy if we don't know sadness, so I just accept this little bit of sadness and go on with happiness," Simmons said.

She tries to save some of her paycheck each month to get a camper van to drive to Texas to visit her grandson.

"At this point in my life, my expectations are very low," Simmons said. "I found out that it was hard to start over in your 40s."

Even with all these expenses, she said she's been denied local and federal assistance. She makes slightly over the $3,288 gross monthly income threshold for a two-person household to qualify for CalFresh, California's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as Food Stamps.

"I haven't really looked at the Food Stamp requirements for California recently since I just figured they're going to look at me and be like, you make $20 an hour and don't pay rent, so why do you need food stamps?" Simmons said.

Even when it was lower last year, her income disqualified her from most affordable housing, as she makes well above the monthly rental assistance threshold in San Diego for an SRO or a one- or two-bedroom apartment.

She said she's not alone among her coworkers and friends — one of her coworkers devotes half of his income to rent.

She's nowhere near alone in her fears about retirement, either. She has no retirement fund, and she thinks her best-case scenario is ending up at a nursing home.

She said that she has no choice but to continue working, as she said her expected Social Security payments in a few years would not be enough. She wants to remain active and have purpose at work, especially as she's been discussing a promotion to an office position.

She said she's in relatively good health, and given that her mother died when she was in her late 40s, she views life at the moment as "bonus time."

"I just know that things are not necessarily always going to be this way because I have seen changes in my life before," Simmons said. "I'm just pushing through and staying positive, though it's not always easy."

Are you a peak boomer or ALICE? Are you worried about retirement? Reach out to this reporter at nsheidlower@businessinsider.com.

• Chinese leader Xi Jinping is visiting France in the first leg of his European Union visit.
• Xi's visit seeks to avoid tensions with the EU similar to those faced by Beijing and Washington.
• Xi's visit comes at a crucial time as the European Union prepares for elections.

China has been on a diplomatic blitz with major world powers in the past few weeks, hosting US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Secretary of State Authority Blinken, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in April.

Now, it's Chinese leader Xi Jinping's turn to go on the charm offensive in his first state visit to the European Union in five years, with France as his first stop.

Xi is spending two days in France, where he is expected to meet French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday before heading to Serbia and Hungary.

The Chinese leader's visit to France is important since the country is the European Union's second-largest economy.

It also comes on the heels of Blinken's trip to China late last month, where the two sides wrangled over a range of issues from trade to national security. They remain at odds and the disputes could heat up as the US elections near later this year, say analysts.

France, like the US and Germany, has been complaining about China's factory overcapacity, particularly in the green sector.

"I'm calling for an 'aggiornamento' because China is now in excess capacity in many areas and exports massively to Europe," Macron told La Tribune Dimanche, per a Bloomberg translation. Macron was using the Italian word for "update" as he called for a refresh in France-China ties.

Xi's agenda in Europe

So, what can we expect from Xi's time in Europe?

Xi is hoping to avoid the same sort of stress that Beijing is facing with Washington, said an expert.

"Xi will use his time with Macron to downplay China's ongoing support for Putin's war machine," Matt Geraci, an assistant director at the Atlantic Council's Global China Hub, wrote in a note on Thursday.

"He will also underscore that France and other European nations continue to benefit from economic engagement with China, and that they should pursue an independent course rather than following Washington's lead," Geraci added.

Macron, for his part, is expected to call on Xi to use China's influence on Russia to end the war in Ukraine, his office told the Associated Press.

Macron said in April last year that a big risk facing Europe is getting caught up in "crises that are not ours."

Furthermore, there are differences among EU countries when it comes to their China strategy.

"Beijing, cognizant of the increasingly apparent differences within Europe on countering China's subsidies in key industries such as EVs, aims to create wedges between member states to complicate the EU's anti-subsidy probe into Chinese EV imports," Geraci added.

EU elections are weeks away

The European Union is slated to hold elections for the European Parliament in June. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is seeking a second term for the top job.

Von der Leyen, who is expected to meet Xi with Macron on Monday, slammed an "oversupply of Chinese subsidized goods" ahead of the gathering. She said China's trade practices are leading to unfair trade that are "market-distorting" and "could lead to deindustrialization in Europe."

China has pushed back on the West's claims of overcapacity, accusing the bloc of being protectionist and of trying to curb China's economic development.

Beijing is now trying to steer China's economy, which is in a painful transition from its reliance on real estate and lower-value manufacturing to the hot new sectors of EVs, lithium batteries, and solar panels.

The trade issues will "undoubtedly" be a key discussion issue, particularly since China is in an economic slump, wrote Léonie Allard, a visiting fellow at the Atlantic Council's Europe Center, in a note on Thursday.

Macron told the Economist in a recent interview that he is willing to continue working with China on "major global issues" and to bring China "back into line with international rules."

However, Europe — like China — isn't quite the same anymore, following years of economic malaise punctuated by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

"2024 is not 2019, and there is much more clarity about the limits of viewing China as a trusted partner," Allard added, referring to the last time Xi visited France.

• Jim White retired at 43 with his wife after years of saving with a net worth of over $1 million.
• White said he wanted to spend more time with his family and valued having more freedom in life.
• The family moved to Panama and then traveled around the US while homeschooling their daughter.

Jim White started dreaming about retiring early when his daughter was born in 2010. Like many new fathers in the US, he took just a week off from his office job to spend time with his newborn.

"My heart broke," he told Business Insider. "I wanted to be with her as she grew up and felt like work was in the way."

White, who worked as an engineering manager for an IT company in Ohio, told BI he couldn't see how he'd be able to quit his job without being "filthy rich."

He came across a blog by Joe Udo called "Retire by 40" in 2014. Udo, who was around the same age as White, detailed how he planned to retire early by aggressively saving and investing his 9-to-5 salary. If Udo could do it, White thought, maybe he could too.

They saved and invested better

White started researching the FIRE movement — Financial Independence, Retire Early — and pitched his plan to his wife, Lisa, who worked for a nonprofit.

The couple had already been saving but decided to ramp up their savings and investments. White was making $107,000 a year in 2014.

The couple had a net worth of $813,000 but started following the 4% rule, which says you should only retire early if you can live off 4% of your savings each year.

If they could build a portfolio of $1 million, they'd be able to use $40,000 a year on living expenses.

The couple built a portfolio of over $1 million

White said the main change he made was adjusting his investments.

"Although I had been socking away a lot of money into the 401(k) plan at work, I had just picked random mutual funds that seemed good because they showed some good performance in prior years," he added.

Analyzing his plan, he discovered one fund he was investing in was "very high cost" and switched from mutual funds to lower-cost index funds. By tweaking the funds he included in his plan, he told BI he saved around $65,000.

The hardest part was waiting, White said. Once they'd cut their expenses and changed their investments, they had to wait for their savings to accumulate. They also started saving 60% of his pay and living off the rest.

They retired and moved to Panama

By 2018, they had investments, assets, and savings worth over $1 million, according to financial documents BI has viewed.

They sold their house for $267,800 in 2018 and rented a nearby apartment for a few months. White retired at the end of the year aged 43 — Lisa had already left her job.

With their newfound freedom, the couple decided to relocate to Boquete, a small town in Panama, because of its warmer climate. "I've lived in Ohio pretty much my whole life, and I can't stand the winters," White said. "We moved to the mountains of Panama, and it was 75 degrees every day of the year."

They sold their car and most of their belongings and packed the rest into a storage unit. The family moved with their daughter, then nine, in July 2019. They rented a three-bedroom house in a gated community for $1,100 a month and didn't need a car. "We'd walk every day," he said.

They started homeschooling their daughter, intending to place her in an international school later. But, they ended up homeschooling her for the three years they lived in Panama, because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

They lived off around $50,000 a year, slightly higher than anticipated.

The couple moved back to the US to travel in an RV

They moved back to the US in April 2022. Since October, the family has been traveling around Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia, Indiana, Texas, and Arizona in an RV, which they bought but plan to sell after their trip.

"We've been spending incredible amounts of time as a family, just like I wanted, ever since," he said. "It's really been a dream come true."

When they're finished with their travels, they plan to move back to Ohio to give their daughter, who is now 14, some stability. "We've had our quality time together, and now she wants to spend more time with her friends," White told BI.

Lisa wants to live near family again and plans to return to work part-time.

For now, White is content to spend his time on hobbies like coding, learning Spanish, and writing his blog, "Route to Retire."

"Just because we're not working right now doesn't mean we don't plan to ever work again," White said. "It's just that we have that choice."

• Business Insider's Seed 100 and Seed 40 lists are created based on data from Termina.
• Termina began with data on over 1,800 investors, analyzing 25 success attributes, such as exits.
• The analysis identifies skilled investors with a high likelihood of continued success.

The Seed 100 and Seed 40 lists are derived from a statistical analysis of investor track records. We've been working with Business Insider to publish these lists for the past four years, but this is the first year we're doing so under the Termina brand. Incubated by Tribe Capital, Termina is an AI-software platform that powers quantitative due diligence for leading investors around the world.

Our methodology is the same as it was in past years. It analyzes each investor's performance in 25 areas using Crunchbase and PitchBook data. Since one of our goals is to analyze investor's potential success rather than focus solely on past achievements, we only assess investors who have made a minimum of five investments between 2009 and 2024. Our list includes solo venture capitalists and angel investors who are assessed based on their investments in US companies.

To be named to the list, seed investors must have:

1. Investments that performed well, including successful IPOs or acquisitions (exits that were meaningfully above "liquidation preference" or showed increased company value rather than simply raising capital).

2. Show intermediate signs of future success with seed investments that consistently receive follow-on investment.

3. Be active in the seed-investing ecosystem, with moderate-to-high levels of activity over the past two years.

Though each criterion is weighted equally, exits (IPOs or acquisitions) statistically have the most influence in differentiating investors.

Over 1,800 investors met the above criteria, an 18% increase from last year. The seed-investor ecosystem grows every year, making the list more competitive. We're also delighted that there were 187 female candidates with sufficient data, a significant increase that allowed us to release an expanded Seed 40 list this year. Ten percent of all seed investors in scope were women, up from 8% when the first Seed 100 was released in 2021.

The final rankings had 35 new investors, 21 who improved their rank, and 39 with the same or lower rank as last year.

AI is storming seed investing and beyond

One reason we look at seed-stage investments is because they tend to be leading indicators of innovation in the coming years. OpenAI released their GPT-4 model just over a year ago. The model reached an inflection point of capability that has ignited the imagination of entrepreneurs and investors worldwide. The result in just one year is the largest-ever rebalancing of how investors allocate seed capital across sectors. In our analysis, AI tech receives over 16% of all seed-investing capital, with a significant jump in the 12 months following GPT-4's release.

In the chart below, we show five seed-investment categories to contextualize the growth of AI investment. This is not an exhaustive view of seed-investment sectors. In this view, though there has been a steady expansion of AI investing at the seed stage, the jump last year clearly stands out.

We believe AI will allow more seed-stage companies to bring products to market with less capital, similar to how cloud computing accelerated processes and reduced the capital required to launch products. If true, this will make seed-stage investing even more critical as AI begins to form the infrastructure that launches new tech products and services.

Jake Ellowitz is the chief technology officer and cofounder of Termina.

• A prolonged drought in southeast Asia contributed to massive fish deaths in southern Vietnam.
• The climate crisis and human development threaten the Mekong Delta, a key global agricultural center.
• Despite infrastructure measures, some farmers are still struggling to access water. 

A weekslong drought across parts of southeast Asia has killed hundreds of thousands of fish in a reservoir in Vietnam and pushed a key metric for coffee prices to record levels — just two indicators of the kind of havoc the climate is wreaking on people and the economy.

In Vietnam, the maze of wetlands that comprise the Mekong Delta is called the country's "rice bowl" because of the vast agriculture it supports. The climate crisis and human development threaten the water the region relies on, especially in El Niño years like this one.

As Vietnam's freshwater levels drop, salt water intrudes, causing massive economic devastation. From 2020 to 2023, the Mekong Delta lost 70 trillion Vietnamese dong, or $2.96 billion, annually because of salt intrusion, the country's Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment said in mid-March. Those figures are expected to climb in coming years, the ministry said.

While Vietnam is no longer a heavily agricultural economy, the industry still accounted for about 12% of its GDP last year, according to the World Bank.

It's too early to know exactly how this year's drought, exacerbated by El Niño, will affect harvests and exports. But early gauges indicate trouble for at least one key export. Vietnam's coffee association said in late March that exports of robusta coffee — the bean used in espresso and instant coffee — could decline as much as 20% in the 12 months ending in September, compared with the same period last year. Vietnam is the world's largest robusta producer, and futures prices for the bean hit a 16-year high last week.

Meanwhile, in southern Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of fish died in a reservoir last month as temperatures peaked over 100 degrees Fahrenheit and no rain fell for weeks, the AFP reported. Residents blamed the weather and the reservoir's management.

Business Insider could not locate the owner of the reservoir for comment.

Irrigation measures, including those put in after a disastrous 2020 drought, have helped keep much of the Mekong Delta wet despite the widespread dryness, reported the Mekong Dam Monitor last week. The group, run by a US think tank, highlighted that two southern provinces still had "extreme dryness" — and those areas are harvesting crops this month, the group said.

Water levels are below average in 13 of the country's 24 monitoring stations, largely in the far north and far south, according to the intergovernmental agency Mekong River Commission.

While Vietnam has built significant infrastructure to combat increasingly brutal droughts, farmers told local media last month they're still struggling. Some of the reservoirs they need to tap are contaminated with chemicals like alum, while other irrigation options are costly. A farmer in a central province said two acres of his rice burned from the drought.

"Every year we harvest about 18 bags of rice, each bag is 60 kilograms, but this year there is a lack of water, so maybe we'll only get a few bags," Ksor Phung told VnExpress.

At least three provinces declared states of emergency last month, asking for government help to address water shortages and salinity problems.

The drought in Vietnam underscores how the climate crisis is hitting agriculture worldwide. Lower and less predictable crop yields can translate to lower productivity, higher inflation, and worse nutrition, among other issues.

• A Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia isn't on the cards until 2025, says Jake Sullivan.
• Russia will make advances in the "coming period" even though US aid to Ukraine is coming, he said.
• "You can't instantly flip the switch," Sullivan said.

Ukraine may have gotten their long-awaited US aid last month, but a counteroffensive against Russia won't be on the cards until 2025, says US national security advisor Jake Sullivan.

Sullivan was speaking at The Financial Times Weekend Festival in Washington on Saturday when he offered his assessment of the Ukraine war.

Ukraine, Sullivan said, will still be able to "hold the line" and withstand Russian attacks through 2024 with the aid that's coming from the US. But Sullivan said he still expects "Russian advances in the coming period" as it will take some time for US aid to reach Ukraine.

"You can't instantly flip the switch," Sullivan told festival attendees.

A counteroffensive, where Ukraine can "move forward to recapture the territory that the Russians have taken from them," will only take place in 2025, Sullivan said.

Ukraine's defense ministry didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

Sullivan's remarks on the war come at a precarious time for Ukraine. Besides dealing with repeated calls from the GOP to halt US aid, the country is also fending off an invigorated Russian army.

"The army is actually now larger — by 15 percent — than it was when it invaded Ukraine," US Army Gen. Christopher Cavoli said in a House Armed Services Committee hearing on April 10.

"The severity of this moment cannot be overstated: If we do not continue to support Ukraine, Ukraine could lose," said Cavoli, who is also NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.  

Last month, the House of Representatives finally approved more than $60 billion in aid to Ukraine. The bill was delayed for months due to staunch GOP opposition. In fact, when the bill was passed on April 20, 112 Republicans voted against it.

According to the Institute for the Study of War, the incoming aid will provide little immediate relief for the Ukrainians.

This, the ISW said, is because the Russians are still able to "take advantage of the limited window before the arrival of new US aid" to ramp up their attacks.

"The frontline situation will therefore likely continue to deteriorate in that time," the US think tank wrote.