My previous post was a test of the Windows Live Writer. Whenever in the past I've used a Microsoft product for anything remotely HTML-ish, the results have sucked dead bunnies. The generated HTML is a disaster and never seems to render correctly on anything other than Windows/IE. Live Writer is very different, at least when writing to Blogger. It was just straight text. But I really don't see the point in using it. It isn't any easier or faster than the standard Blogger web-ware, and I couldn't figure out a way to zoom the text so I can read what I'm typing that didn't screw up the actual post. Maybe I missed something. In any case, I saw no compelling reason to change how I've been doing this blog for the last six years. Maybe I'm just to distracted.
Another week has gone by, so of course another batch of banks have bitten the dust. The good news is that both the rate of failures and the size of the banks involved are much lower than last year. Maybe 2010 will be a floor? That would be nice.
While most of the focus has been on the federal deficits, the states are in even worse shape. California is contemplating taking on the Supreme Court in order to generate revenue. This was inevitable recession or not. For years, sales tax revenues have been eroded by mail-order and internet purchases. When you buy something from a catalog or the internet and the company does not have a physical presence in your state, the company isn't responsible for collecting the sales tax. The buyer is supposed to pay it when they file their taxes. I've done a lot of tax returns over the last 20 years and have never had someone tell me to add in the tax on stuff they bought online. In the past, the states griped about it from time to time, but it really wasn't enough money to bother with. The internet combined with the desperate condition most states are in looks to bring the whole mess to a head. I'm sure the solution will benefit no one but the lawyers and politicians. As always.
Speaking of morally defective politicians, the Chairman of the IPCC is once-again proving that a) the IPCC is a political body, not a scientific one, b) that all politicians are moral defectives, and c) that the morally defective politicians at the center of global warming alarmism don't give a tinker's dam about the planet.
I know that reading really long articles on the internet is a bit of a pain, but How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America is worth the effort. It is likely that most of what is discussed there isn't news to anyone that has been paying even the slightest attention, but it is useful to have it all laid out in one place. Some gems:
The broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment (which includes people who want to work but have stopped actively searching for a job, along with those who want full-time jobs but can find only part-time work) reached 17.4 percent in October, which appears to be the highest figure since the 1930s. And for large swaths of society—young adults, men, minorities—that figure was much higher (among teenagers, for instance, even the narrowest measure of unemployment stood at roughly 27 percent). One recent survey showed that 44 percent of families had experienced a job loss, a reduction in hours, or a pay cut in the past year....
...more than 140 banks failed in 2009. As a result, banks have kept lending standards tight, frustrating the efforts of small businesses—which have accounted for almost half of all job losses—to invest or rehire....
As of November, one in seven mortgages was delinquent, up from one in 10 a year earlier. As many as one in four houses may now be underwater, and the ratio of household debt to GDP, about 65 percent in the mid-1990s, is roughly 100 percent today....
The economy now sits in a hole more than 10 million jobs deep—that’s the number required to get back to 5 percent unemployment, the rate we had before the recession started, and one that’s been more or less typical for a generation. And because the population is growing and new people are continually coming onto the job market, we need to produce roughly 1.5 million new jobs a year—about 125,000 a month—just to keep from sinking deeper....
Strong evidence suggests that people who don’t find solid roots in the job market within a year or two have a particularly hard time righting themselves. In part, that’s because many of them become different—and damaged—people. Krysia Mossakowski, a sociologist at the University of Miami, has found that in young adults, long bouts of unemployment provoke long-lasting changes in behavior and mental health. “Some people say, ‘Oh, well, they’re young, they’re in and out of the workforce, so unemployment shouldn’t matter much psychologically,’” Mossakowski told me. “But that isn’t true"....
Many of today’s young adults seem temperamentally unprepared for the circumstances in which they now find themselves. Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has carefully compared the attitudes of today’s young adults to those of previous generations when they were the same age. Using national survey data, she’s found that to an unprecedented degree, people who graduated from high school in the 2000s dislike the idea of work for work’s sake, and expect jobs and career to be tailored to their interests and lifestyle. Yet they also have much higher material expectations than previous generations, and believe financial success is extremely important. “There’s this idea that, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to work, but I’m still going to get all the stuff I want,’” Twenge told me. “It’s a generation in which every kid has been told, ‘You can be anything you want. You’re special’”....
That just scratches the surface. Much good stuff.
At some point in the last couple months, I think we have decided we will be leaving New England sometime in the fall. Like most of our major life-decisions, I don't recall setting down and having some sort of rational discussion and coming to a conclusion about staying or going. It's more like in our casual conversations we have gone from "if we leave" to "when we leave." It was inevitable, I suppose, given the insane cost of living around here combined with being back in winter weather. We'll probably start the initial planning sometime over the summer, then get out of here just before winter sets in and head down to Florida. With what it costs for us to live here, we wouldn't be burning through any more of our savings by living in Florida without either of us working that we are here with both of us working. (That may be a slight exaggeration; but only a slight one.)
And it's time to get ready for another day at Psychos R Us.
No comments:
Post a Comment