Good Morning

The worst is behind us!

dum luk wrote:

jobless inflation

Ah, time to break out the misery index. Everything old is new again!! How long will Ben be able to keep rates at 0%; Bond vigilantes first? What is the inflation rate for other currencies?

Rumor says 10 to 15% cut at my workplace by Mar 31
'Its an ongoing process '

Lobbyist Ben Dover wrote:

If we deported the Illegals that would free up how many jobs for Americans?

I'd rather they deport the H1-B's.

Hoopajoops LTD wrote:

As a young, educated job seeker, it's as if the bottom three rungs of the career ladder have been sawed off. There is simply nowhere in this economy to get a good hold of anything.

You're an atty in CA. You must be able to sue somebody over this.

Lobbyist Ben Dover wrote:

If we deported the Illegals that would free up how many jobs for Americans?

Be careful what you wish for. Those illegals would vacate a lot of housing units, probably leave a lot of cars behind. Rents and home prices in CA would drop.

On a more positive note, there would be less traffic.

Blackhalo wrote:

I'd rather they deport the H1-B's.

Got to start some where and the term Illegal works the best. Hard to deport legal workers in comparison. More like not renew or accept new ones. Time to get selfish for a while.

There is No fundamental recovery taking place. It's another debt induced spurt of speculation. Nothing more.

We have years of misery in front of us thanks to junk eCONomics at the Fed and epic Wall St. looting.

Trillions and trillions in bogus credit will not disappear any time soon.

HomeGnome wrote:

Bovine Americans aren't going to pick crops or do heavy physical labor.

Some will. Somebody also will get the bright idea of using prison labor.

Oh, and some things in agriculture will finally be mechanized.

Lobbyist Ben Dover wrote:

If we deported the Illegals that would free up how many jobs for Americans?

not as many as most people think because Americans wouldn't work the jobs . Here in Vermont we are short farm labor but we have people on welfare.

From the report...

CR, these states haven't gotten your memo about construction being dead for the foreseeable future:

CA -13,535 Fewer layoffs in the construction industry.
PA -9,491 Fewer layoffs in the construction, trade, and service industries.
FL -3,587 Fewer layoffs in the construction, trade, service, and manufacturing industries, and agriculture.
IL -1,815 Fewer layoffs in the construction, trade, and manufacturing industries.
WI -1,412 Fewer layoffs in the construction, trade, public administration, and manufacturing industries.
NC -1,408 Fewer layoffs in the construction, service, and apparel industries.

(maybe there's no one left to layoff. I know a few small builders here in NC who are down to the owners and 1 or 2 staff. Everyone else has gotten the axe)

And it's nice to see that our auto and manufacturing recovery is bearing fruit for the workers. Oh, wait a minute.

STATES WITH AN INCREASE OF MORE THAN 1,000
State Change State Supplied Comment

MI +1,724 Layoffs in the automobile industry.
IA +2,014 Layoffs in the manufacturing industry.

The jobs situation is worse than ever too. Every dollar we send abroad to fund our CONsumption based trade deficit makes us poorer and less able to create jobs.

Of course, the swindlers on Wall St. get wealthy the debt based impoverishment of our nation.

The democratic party, if it were principled, should be the party rallying for the end of our illegal immigrant slave labor racket. Instead, they have betrayed a long-time cornerstone of their base, wage earners and labor unions.

GOD DAMNIT HOOCOODANODE WHY ARE YOU PAUSING AND PAUSING AND PAUSING AND LAGGING WHEN I AM TRYING TO TYPE IT IS REALLY FUCKING UP MY COMPOSITION

Hoopajoops LTD,

We have to go backwards to catch up with the contraction and provide jobs to baseline. To continue free services to illegals and UE benefits does nothing but extend and pretend. Reality sucks, Flat out. Many Americans need to find out what real work is like. Party is over.

Juvenal Delinquent wrote:

I've yet to see a non-Hispanic picking crops in the Central Valley...

Guest-Worker Debate: Human or Mechanical Labor? : NPR

For a 'serviced-based' economy; why not employ people to actually perform a 'service'? Who likes going through those automated telephone menus and never reach a real live person (and maybe if you do, they aren't in the USA)? How is it that we can't have enough RNs in hospitals, enough LPNs or even primary care physicians?

When I rarely go to a shopping mall (I live rurally), is there anyone around that knows the merchandise and can assist me? Does everyone need to a freaking BA to be a secretary? Is it more efficient for a research engineer and its entire lab to answer their own phones, type up their own letters and documents, schedule their own travel, etc.- is that a productive use of their time?

extended and emergency unemployment benefits.

Now it's time to start using their "double secret" unemployment benefits!

Angry Saver wrote:

Wu Hu! Meet your new masters.

The UK also:
UK government posts first January borrowing on record |
Business |
guardian.co.uk

REBear wrote:

Rumor says 10 to 15% cut at my workplace by Mar 31

That's scary. I hope you avoid the cuts.

from: In the Fields: Visas help build labor pool | workers, duron, temporary - News - YumaSun

Every season Yuma-area harvesting and produce-packing companies worry whether they will have enough hands to harvest their valuable crops of fruits and vegetables.
...
One way these employers have been getting those "hands" is through the H-2A temporary agricultural worker program, which allows them to bring foreign workers in from Mexico to harvest their fields

LBD, the "illegal immigrants use up our free services!" line is bunk. They contribute far more in the form of labor than they take.

The real destruction they cause is their insidious union-busting ability among the skilled laborers. Electricians, plumbers, construction workers, agricultural workers, all used to be union strongholds. Their bargaining position has been weakened so thoroughly by an infinite supply of mexican peasant labor that they are now lucky to receive the wages of a mexican peasant.

The democratic party used to be a party of honest labor, the working stiff, of unions, and of solidarity among the blue collar crowd. They betrayed the backbone of america they used to represent by supporting the non-enforcement of illegal immigration laws against employers and by supporting NAFTA and trade policies with China.

All these tea party folks should be democrats, but they're not; the only party that purports to represent their interests are the Republicans. But the repubs are and always have been a party of the elite, the wealthy, the privileged. This fit is bad, the working stiffs are realizing that they've been betrayed by both sides of the aisle, and are lashing out.

Man my brain is fuzzy this morning, I'm not feeling like I'm writing very well.

some investor guy writes:
I'm guessing you're an advocate of energy independence? Now seems like a good time. It you're going to blow lots of govt money on stimulus, go for conservation, wind, solar, etc.

NUCLEAR NUCLEAR NUCLEAR NUCLEAR NUCLEAR NUCLEAR NUCLEAR NUCLEAR NUCLEAR NUCLEAR NUCLEAR NUCLEAR NUCLEAR NUCLEAR NUCLEAR

Wind and solar are complete bunk. We need nuclear plants. Thousands of them.

tncubsfan wrote:

Now it's time to start using their "double secret" unemployment benefits!

Once again ... proof that western civilisation is but a footnote to the Greeks.

OT - 's looking hungry today.

SNAFU wrote:

Do you? If it were up to me , I would given them green card straight out of schools/residency.

Flooding the market with foreign labor, even skilled, educated labor, increases supply, lowering compensation and opportunity for native born, equally qualified labor, and reduces the incentives for domestic talent to seek that training or qualification. Anecdotal evidence is less than compelling to me.

4shzl wrote:

Bruce in Tennessee wrote:
Our financial crisis, however, is more like War and Peace to get through, rather than Green Eggs and Ham.

"There’s nothing all that remarkable about the future ahead of us; it’s simply that the unparalleled abundance that our civilization bought by burning through half a billion years of stored sunlight in three short centuries has left most people in the industrial world clueless about the basic realities of human life in more ordinary times.
It’s this cluelessness that underlies so many enthusiastic discussions of a green future full of high technology and relative material abundance. Those discussions also rely on one of the dogmas of the modern religion of progress, the article of faith that the accumulation of technical knowledge was what gave the industrial world its three centuries of unparalleled wealth; since technical knowledge is still accumulating, the belief goes, we may expect more of the same in the future."
--Greer

Oregon here. from what i hear, highschool kids used to pick crops, do the haying, etc in summer. seems that stopped with child labor laws. not sure of the mechanism. i hear older folk lamenting the days that teenagers could earn some $ and blow off steam doing that hard work.

Hoopajoops LTD,

Lots of unions need busted. They are part of the problem, look deep into the UAW and GM. Also look at run away government expenses as Unions have grown in Government labor. Things are out of balance every where. Illegals are part of the problem. Americans think they are to good for the jobs their fore fathers did are part of the problem. On and on. Contraction is going back to what worked mixed with the good things we have learned. Same process as running a race car.

Hoopajoops LTD wrote:

All these tea party folks should be democrats, but they're not ...

The Dems haven't had these people's backs for decades.

A very good book on the subject ...

What's the matter with Kansas.

We need nuclear plants. Thousands of them.

Hoops,

There is no shortage of electricity in this country. I won't even mention how much energy we waste either.

Don't buy the debt creation hype.

Hoopajoops LTD wrote:

Greer seems to be ignorant of the fact that there is a gigantic nuclear reactor hovering in the sky representing a nearly infinite supply of energy.

That is real time energy--
We have been using stored energy, in ancient sunlight.
Living real time will be interesting again, that is his point.

One should gain some thermodynamic literacy.

OT sort of:
Stocks Weigh Down U.S. Pension Funds : NPR

.....

"Many plan sponsors hoped that by investing in the stock market they would make higher-than-expected returns, thereby reducing the need to contribute so much," she says. And that happened in the 1980s and 1990s. But it didn't last.

"There is a downside to volatility and we're now experiencing it with a vengeance," she says.

So what will happen?

Kirkegaard says the pressure on companies to increase contributions will most likely lead companies to lay off more people than they otherwise would have.

The good news for workers with corporate defined-benefit plans is that their plans are partially insured by the federal government through the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. In 2008, there were 44 million Americans who were either actively working or retired with a private sector defined-benefit pension plan from a company, according to the PBGC. These plans pay out a fixed amount of money each month until you die.

But no such protections exist for the roughly 20 million state and government workers or for average investors with 401(k) or IRA plans.

The study also found that some state and local government pension funds are drastically underfunded — a crisis that looms large because they support some of the oldest work forces in the nation. A case in point is the Indian State Teachers Retirement Fund, which had a funding ratio of 43.4 percent in 2006, or the Illinois State Employees Retirement System, which had a funding radio of 52.2 percent for the same year. Ideally, this figure should be closer to 100 percent, Kirkegaard says.

....

Lobbyist Ben Dover wrote:

Tax time. Have a good one!

YouTube - The Beatles - Taxman

Man, I must have been poorer than I thought growing up. I picked beans, pecans, berries, tomatoes, corn, peppers...I mentioned this before..but grandfather had a (what he liked to call) little garden, but 20 acres is a lot of work. Whole family came home for harvest. Men picked, women canned. Gave surpluses to food banks...fought over who got the extra can of green beans. Lots of baking and fishing in there too. Didn't get paid a dime, but it was some of the happiest work I have ever done. I didn't appreciate it near enough growing up.

Juvenal Delinquent wrote:

That's one ton of fruit...

......no wonder you never see fat field workers........

Vonbek777 wrote:

Man, I must have been poorer than I thought growing up.

Not necessarily - just someone who lived through GD1...

Lots of unions need busted. They are part of the problem

LBD, because their situation is hopeless, they've transformed their mission away from representing the working stiff and counter-balancing the much, much more powerful employer and towards doing whatever they can to hang on. You should watch the second season of the wire if you want to understand what many unions have been forced to become.

Now, don't forget that your republican friends would really love to have a zillion illegal immigrants in the country (why do you think bush didn't take care of this problem when he was in power?), regulatory laws removed, civil rights legislation repealed, minimum wage laws eliminated, and unions busted and/or laws protecting collective bargaining agreements repealed or unenforced. They'll feed you all kinds of lines about unions being inherently evil and free market forces needing to be unrestricted to work to get this done.

Ask yourself this. If the Republicans think that government regulation is evil and that individuals should be allowed to make their own way, but also that individuals who happen to be workers banding together to represent their interests as a solid block to their employers are evil and should be eliminated, what kind of institution does that leave? Companies and wealthy individuals who are big enough that they don't need to band together to get enough power to be heard. Who gets to band together and protect their interests, in the republican's eyes? Companies banding together, creating monopolistic trusts. You never hear about how badly you're fucked by archer daniels midland, fixing your commodity prices. Who are you more afraid of, a bunch of dumb-fuck union workers with no money in a dying industry or the real holders of power and wealth, the people who control your food and your congress?

Don't buy into anti-union propaganda. I seem to be mentally retarded right now for some reason and unable to compose properly, but some time when I'm not incapacitated I will go into the union thing further.

Vonbek777 wrote:

Didn't get paid a dime, but it was some of the happiest work I have ever done. I didn't appreciate it near enough growing up.

one day, and that day seems to be approaching, you/we will learn to appreciate it again

4shzl wrote:

Amen. A commenter at ZH recently noted that economics is a branch of thermodynamics.

I wondered about that looking at this: (phd in Theoretical Physics from Caltech!)

Sean Hamidi - LinkedIn

Black Star Ranch wrote:

no wonder you never see fat field workers

c'mon BSR, just like fat guys drove slicks and skinny guys drove guns

the fat guys work in the warehouse

adornosghost writes:
That is real time energy--
We have been using stored energy, in ancient sunlight.
Living real time will be interesting again, that is his point.

Tap some of the energy that radiates from our sun in a more active manner, rather than passively absorbing the minuscule fraction of whatever happens to make it through our atmosphere, and we could have enough energy on this planet, in "real time," to vaporize the entire mass of the planet. People who think we have an energy crisis, that without oil we have to return to toiling like some kind of stupid apes, are simply not thinking big enough. Nuclear power as a stopgap, solar sats and extra-terrestrial power accumulation for the long run. There is no shortage of energy in the universe, just look in the goddamn sky.

Gold futures are up $7 and change....not down as per Market Watch.

The dollar is heading down....

I was snarking, and yes you are right...GD 1, great grandma's first husband disappeared. Managed to find work with AT&T and later Southwestern Bell. But it was hard times. She gardened, quilted, cooked...from sunup to sundown...quilted while working as an operator...multitasking even back then. Both my grandmother and grandfather worked for SW Bell too...and the three of them pinched every penny and grew as much of their food as they could. Grandfather fished on Saturdays...main meat source was fish. I don't know when they ever slept.

talking to myself, this graph on pension fund allocations in US vs other countries

NPR: U.S. Pension Funds Big On Stocks

Nanoo-Nanoo wrote:

talking to myself, this graph on pension fund allocations in US vs other countries My Head Just Exploded

NPR: U.S. Pension Funds Big On Stocks

We're a nation of riverboaters . . .

You've said it pretty damn well so far, Hoops. Much better than I could have.
Keep up the good work.

Top 400 Earners in U.S Averaged $345 Million in 2007, IRS Says - Bloomberg.com

Feb. 18 (Bloomberg) -- The 400 highest-earning U.S. households reported an average of $345 million in income in 2007, up 31 percent from a year earlier, IRS statistics show.

The average tax rate for the households fell to the lowest in almost 20 years.

The figures for 2007, the last year of an economic expansion, show that the average income reported by the top 400 earners more than doubled from $131.1 million in 2001. That year, Congress adopted tax cuts urged by then-President George W. Bush that Democrats say disproportionately benefits the wealthy.

Each household in the top 400 of earners paid an average tax rate of 16.6 percent,the lowest since the agency began tracking the data in 1992, the Internal Revenue Service statistics show. Their average effective tax rate was about half the 29.4 percent in 1993, the first year of President Bill Clinton’s administration, when taxes were increased.

The statistics underscore “two long-term trends: that income at the very top has exploded and their taxes have been cut dramatically,” said Chuck Marr, director of federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington research group that supports increasing taxes on high-income individuals.

.....

The "theoretical" is the problem here. The U.S. has been overproducing theoretical Ph.D.s and sending them to Wall Street. The experimentalists are the ones with a grasp of reality; the others are generally overly credulous in dealing with their own theories...

Yup. My Dad is a physicist (experiment type) and has noted this trend among physicists and mathematicians for years.

Wisdom Speaker wrote:

4shzl wrote:

commenter at ZH recently noted that economics is a branch of thermodynamics.

And it's nonlinear, nonequilibrium, chaotic thermodynamics, my friend.

And it is still a discipline waiting for its' Feynman. Heck, they haven't even had their Watts yet.

's here. All is well.

Gotta get back to the real world again.

Hoopajoops LTD wrote:

People who think we have an energy crisis, that without oil we have to return to toiling like some kind of stupid apes, are simply not thinking big enough.

We shall see, my technocopian friend.

Economics is not science. The fundamental laws of physics, chemistry, etc, don't radically change every few years. New theories are built to augment the previous ideas, but you don't see the wholesale churn that occurs in the social "sciences". After all these years, F still equal ma.

Wisdom Speaker wrote:

Gotta get back to the real world again.

Me too. Thanks to all for an instructive morning.

Morning metaobservation. Is the Euro a superior currency because it is a promise made by eleven more socialist governments than is the US dollar?

Moody's downgrades Sacramento County ratings
| Reuters

Hoopajoops LTD wrote:

solar sats and extra-terrestrial power accumulation for the long run

The question isn't whether the energy is there or not - or even the concept of SPS which have been bruited about since the '60s - it is the necessary investment in infrastructure to make it happen, not only in bringing down the juice but then the electrification of the economy which is currently tied to liquid transportation fuels.

Read this part carefully - even if SPS technology were proven today - from our current state this is the work of a couple of decades to accomplish.

Before you flail out at me Hoops, we are aligned on the end state and the need for movement, particularly with respect to opening the bottle (read: extra-planetary resources). However, IMNSHO making it happen starts from recognizing the scale of the undertaking.

Nuke wrote:

After all these years, F still equal ma.

I did not think that worked at the quantum level? Perhaps we are in the era of quantum economics? The lack of transparency in CDS seems very Heisenberg to me.

We shall see, my technocopian friend.

Haven't heard anything convincing out of you to the contrary. Do you deny that there is a big goddamn ball of energy in our sky? Does it not exist in your world? Do you think that after the oil runs out we're all going to throw up our hands and say, "oh well, game over!" and pick up the nearest stick and start hitting people with it for breeding rights? What kind of scenario do you envision here, where we run out of oil energy and then simply refuse to use nuclear or to launch satellites to capture more energy from the sun and beam it down here as microwaves? I am curious about how you see it playing out. After oil, the future of humanity will play out kind of like two thirsty, retarded toddlers beating each other to death for a teacup of water beside an above-ground swimming pool, from the sound of it.

Nanoo-Nanoo wrote:

The statistics underscore “two long-term trends: that income at the very top has exploded and their taxes have been cut dramatically,” said Chuck Marr, director of federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington research group that supports increasing taxes on high-income individuals.

Cue Dr. Phil "How's that working out for you?"

Hoopajoops LTD wrote:

pick up the nearest stick and start hitting people with it for breeding rights?

Our primate ancestors picked up the stick tens of millions of years ago and no one has dropped it yet.

greenchutes wrote:
Our primate ancestors picked up the stick tens of millions of years ago and no one has dropped it yet.
Yes - whatever they called it, they invented money.

I'm sorry I thought we were discussing orbiting solar collectors which would involve technology...did I not read carefully enough...sorry I haven't had my coffee yet...

Amen greechutes. Today, right now, women still have not reached pay parity with their male counterparts. Oh well. So much for human progress, we're still nothing but a bunch of naked apes.

Blackhalo:

That was my point. For 99.99% of applications, F=ma works. Those who came later noticed that on some scales, it didn't and sought to build a new branch of physics that explained the phenomena they observed. This process is very different than the social sciences, where new, contradictory theories are generated every few years bearing little resemblance to physical reality. Remember, the folks at NakedCapitalism and Phil Krugman believe deficits don't matter, despite thousands of years of evidence to the contrary.

Nanoo-Nanoo, women won't reach pay parity with males until we either relieve them of the burden of bearing children through some technological means, or institute a law that states that the male partner of every conception must spend an equal amount of time off work as the female partner spends for the purpose of conceiving and rearing each child. There is no way around a 1 year hole in a woman's career progress and its effects on her income, even if women were treated absolutely the same in all regards.

Vonbek777 wrote:

I'm sorry I thought we were discussing orbiting solar collectors which would involve technology...did I not read carefully enough...sorry I haven't had my coffee yet...

We were, I was just pointing out the thermodynamics behind the problem.
Magical thinking is fun, and sometimes productive, but one must eventually come to terms with Energy Returned On Energy Invested.

Yes, my wife was back to work in 7 weeks, and she worked from home during those seven weeks. Now 2nd child, she stayed home for six weeks, and then went back on a half day schedule for six more...and worked from home.

Except that Astrology is the hobby of kings, going back thousands of years, giving birth to Astronomy and serving as an inspiring template for all thinigs mystic. FWIW, the only real player I know in finance pays for a Vedic chart every year.

Economics is more like Phrenology.

Nothing wrong with pulling #s out of one's ass if they're reasonably close - you just forgot the zero at the end.

energyecon wrote:

Before you flail out at me Hoops, we are aligned on the end state and the need for movement, particularly with respect to opening the bottle (read: extra-planetary resources). However, IMNSHO making it happen starts from recognizing the scale of the undertaking.

Hard not to appreciate the bottlenecks and logjams, ee.

Nuke wrote:

Luckily for the public

If crude hits $200, we're going to see some real . If it happens, it may well coincide with U6>25%.

From the pie-getting-ever-larger crowd @ Bubblevision, "WalMart sales declines, the first ever in their storied history, could be due to their shoppers TRADING UP!"

How about fewer WMT customers got another UI extension ? That sounds at least a little more plausible.

The problem is we aren't allowed anymore to procreate without it being a gigantic negative if you look into your future and see that black hole which is the cost of raising a child. The poor procreate much faster as their expectations for themselves and for their children are very low, mortality is high, education among the poor traditionally subpar as is access to health care.

I've learned one thing in my life, you really cannot do it all and have it all...at least all at once. I had lower expectations for my life than was actualized. Part of that was luck, part of that was planning, part of that was working my tail off and discipline. More and more couples and women are opting not to have children.

So we find amongst the data that the core PPI only up marginally but the food/energy PPI component up significantly.

That really gave me a pause since I'm only seeing the gas price bump around here within a narrow band, so it has to be food. Expect more of that as the herds continue to be thinned and sugar continues to rise.

This is deflationary, right?

I should call my congressman's finance staffer back and remind him of our pre-TARP phone conversation in which I told him to take the depression - it's coming anyway - and save the currency.

As to teen labor, we still have it here as those 15 + can get their work certs from the school district and pick tomatoes. Also have a good friend who picked berries and veggies with migrants at some local farms. He learned a lot about porn from the single migrant workers.

bearly wrote:

From the pie-getting-ever-larger crowd @ Bubblevision, "WalMart sales,declines the first ever in their storied history, could be due to their shoppers TRADING UP!"

How about fewer WMT customers got another UI extension ? That sounds at least a little more plausible.

Who do you want to believe? The HappiHeads™ in CNBC or the state by state sales tax reporting?

From the pie-getting-ever-larger crowd @ Bubblevision, "WalMart sales,declines the first ever in their storied history, could be due to their shoppers TRADING UP!"

Really? They said that? The upper scale retailers (from Target to Macy's) all all doing worse. Traditional supermarkets are getting crushed.

Quite some time back in this thread, Nanoo wrote:

Stocks Weigh Down U.S. Pension Funds

State retirement benefit promises exceeded pension funds, study finds - washingtonpost.com

and

The Trillion Dollar Gap - The Pew Center on the States

wrt UE claims going back up...

Hope you had a nice rest during the break there. Here we go trudging up the mountain once again.

scone, put the word "economic" in between the and burden in the sentence "we relieve them of the burden" to get my meaning. I mean that bearing (and often uncompensated, disproportionate responsibility for raising) children has economic costs that are partially responsible for wage differentials between women and men. I don't understand how you can find that insulting, it's a fact. Taking time out of your career to do that stuff will have an impact on your wages.

I learned yesterday that I will get some furlough action. Will probably start in April, along with a [temporary] wage freeze.

2009: Oh no, it's a furlough.

2010: Thank goodness, it's a furlough.

Hoops, it is the sentence structure that is offensive. Womenfolk can be a bit touchy about that first person plural, the same first person plural that might deign to tell them all sorts of things about what "they" think is best for a woman's body. The more melanin-endowed people on our planet can have a similar reaction to these syntactical structures.

Target is "upper scale retailer"? Target is killing the grocery chains around my area. Yogurt is $0.89 with your shoppers club card. At Target do you know how much it is? $0.52; and I don't need to get a shoppers card to get that price!

Die store cards die!

As to men and housework.

Honestly, there's going to be an adjustment here akin to the years of the "women's lib" movement. Women will reach pay parity with men, and might have already done so amongst some income classes. Men are perfectly capable of caring for kids and running the household but everything is skewed through the lens of past experiences. The social view of men/husbands/fathers has diminished dramatically with the advent of Homer Simpson and Al Bundy and it's gonna take years to overcome that, coupled with the reality that most men grew up in a time that they didn't have to pay attention and learn about the household like women did. And men are gonna have to wake up to the new realities of the world around us.

Fish and bicycles? Bullshit.

The best immigration group around. (in case you didn't know)

www.numbersusa.com

They get some of my money each year. They are sane and compassionate, yet recognize our immigration policies don't benefit citizens. And they have a real impact on Congress.

Rob Dawg wrote:

Who do you want to believe? The HappiHeads™ in CNBC or the state by state sales tax reporting?

I'm sure they would like to convince their advertisers that they need to buy to grab a share of that "trading-up" market.

Juvenal Delinquent wrote:

Has the IMF run out of veiled threats as far as the barbarous is concerned?

JD, I tend to watch that out of self-interest. Market has seldom shown more than a passing interest in IMF pronouncements on the subject. They've been waving that particular jawbone about for so many years, I think it's now mistaken for a coke spoon.

Scone,
I have noticed a generational gap emerging from my wife's work experience. When she first arrived, we had no hope of advancement. There was blatant sexism from the older folks, both men and women actually. But a strange thing happened, my wife started accomplishing things, which for a government office is a miraculous occurance. The older folks started retiring...and a new boss came in who was results oriented. Actually told my wife she does more work in a day than 20 normal federal employees. So implementing project management...he has made her project manager for most projects, even ones with a higher grade phds working on it. This has ruffled some feathers, but she gets things done...so it is a compromise. The question is whether she will get a promotion. A desk audit has been put in...but HR is concerned about the effect it will have on other employees...if it works though...I might have a little more faith in people regarding women in the workplace.

Well, homedad, maybe you're the exception that proves the rule.

Most of the men I know, when they have a tough career spot (which is most of the men in this country as of this lovely February day) that finds them at home, sink pretty quickly into a sense of depression fueled by entitlement and frustration. Most men never really overcome the alpha-male paradigm, which just doesn't square with the literal handling of shit, which is a substantial part of the early childrearing experience. They think they are Drew Brees, not June Cleaver, and that self-image dies hard.

Outsider wrote:

2010: Thank goodness, it's a furlough.

Good news, you get to keep your health care insurance benefits! Bad news, as a function of income, the costs just went up...

Rob Dawg wrote:

I've noticed a lot of the cable channels running more "filler" commercials. Not just hair club for squirrels but self promotion spots.

The USSC ruling should be good from them though in election season...

Hoopajoops LTD wrote:

I don't understand how you can find that insulting, it's a fact. Taking time out of your career to do that stuff will have an impact on your wages.

It's not for you to decide. That's the whole point. Economic parity is not your fight, and it's not something you can take or give. The mere fact that you assume men have all the power here and can "give" equal rights by fiat is very telling. Injustice exists. Your "right" to repair injustice according to your own values does not exist. Women will eventually come to pay parity on their own terms, thank you very much. And if they choose to do something like take time out from the workforce, that's up to them, not you. You don't own this revolution, you have no business dictating where it goes.

Nanoo-Nanoo wrote:
The idea that children can rear themselves is such BS. Having someone at home after school is essential, having someone at home for those developing years, too essential to put in the hands of strangers.
Again, a key strategy here was to remove the bonding between parent and child that allows the child to inherit the parental worldview and values independent of the conditioning of mass media or socialization. Do you think it accidental that government became the big daddy warmonger and gambler, and nurturing, social-conditioning mommy state shortly after the nuclear family was split up due to economic necessity?

Greenchutes:

But that self-image will eventually die. Like I said, it's going to take a long time and adjustment just like women have had to go through in the workplace. This is generational.

But that doesn't mean that men ultimately aren't capable of caring for the kids and running the household.

some investor guy wrote:

You simply need effective ways of harvesting it or channeling it.

Aye, there's the rub...please fill in that blank - seriously, please do!

Sorry again but I have a question I have yet to hear an answer about, hopefully someone can enlighten me. Who is buying all the debt?
We have debt, EU has debt, UK has debt, China is tightening and not buying, foreign sales are way down in the UST market...so who is??

Greek Debt ‘Twilight Zone’ Spurs Rise in Sovereign Credit Risk - Bloomberg.com

European governments are selling record amounts of debt to haul their economies out of recession. Rising budget deficits, unemployment levels and bad loans in countries from the U.K. to Spain are weighing on sovereign debt markets.

Britain posted its first budget deficit for January since records began in 1993 and jobless claims rose last month to the highest since 1997. Credit-default swaps on the U.K. rose 1.5 basis points to 92.5, CMA prices show.

Bad Loans

Portugal’s unemployment rate rose to 10.1 percent, the highest in 23 years in the fourth quarter after the country’s economy contracted by an estimated 2.7 percent last year. Bad loans at Spanish banks climbed to 5.08 percent of total credit in December.