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Re:Why is Everyone in Tech so sad? by fragmede on Saturday August 08, 2026 @11:15PM (#49228103)
> which could not have possibly have employed more than 0.01% of people at its peak.

I was refuting your made up statistic.

Re:Why is Everyone in Tech so sad? by estearum on Sunday August 09, 2026 @08:41AM (#49230881)
Oh I see, you're claiming that 1.9 million people in the US were engaged in printing.

You're referring to a NAICS code set that includes both printing and the entire publishing apparatus around it.

At printing's peak, there were 70,000 people employed in actual printing in the US. There were lots more engaged in the business around printed goods, but those jobs weren't threatened by desktop publishing. In fact there are more of those people today than there were at the peak of printing, drawing a clear empirical line between those jobs that were destroyed by printing tech improvements and those that were not.

At its peak in the late 90s, printing was 0.025% of US people or 0.05% of the workforce, which (being unbelievably wealthy) would obviously be the extreme high end of print employment globally.

0.01% was obviously a complete finger in the wind estimate, but turned out to be a pretty good guess!

https://whattheythink.com/articles/52978-desktop-publishings...