Habeas Data.

That’s why long-term unemployment has become such a problem.  Our unemployment problem is not, as in previous recessions, that too many people are entering unemployment. Layoffs and discharges are actually lower than they’ve been in a decade.  Rather, our problem is that people aren’t exiting unemployment.  And that’s a much bigger issue.

Human capital is like almost any other form of capital: it is a depreciating asset.  The longer you stay out of the workforce, the less valuable you are to potential employers.  You lose market intelligence and industry connections.  Your technical knowledge and skills atrophy.

This article captures the unemployment situation in a way that I’ve not seen anything else do.

Nearly half of Americans are living in a state of “financial fragility,” a new paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research reveals. To determine this statistic, researchers from the George Washington School of Business, Princeton University, and Harvard Business School asked survey participants whether they would be able to come up with $2,000 for an “unexpected expense in the next month.” 22.2 percent predicted they would be “probably unable” and 27.9 percent said they’d certainly be unable to foot the unplanned bill. The hypothetical cost “reflects the order of magnitude of the cost of an unanticipated major car repair, a large co-payment on a medical expense, legal expenses, or a home repair.” But, it was the participants’ method of coping that really determined their fragility:

Taken together with those who would pawn their possessions, sell their home, or take out a payday loan, 25.7% of respondents who were asked about coping methods (equal to 18.6% of all respondents) would come up with the funds for an emergency by resorting to what might be seen as extreme measures,” the authors write. “Along with the 27.9% of respondents who report that they could certainly not cope with an emergency, this suggests that approximately 46.5% of all respondents are living very close to the financial edge.

And 50% don’t believe in evolution. I wonder what the overlap is…

Roby, raised in Montgomery, Ala., is on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education.

“It’s no panacea, but this legislation will point us in the right direction. Looking at hard data, we know our children are struggling with a heck of a lot of the math, including the geometry incorporating pi,” Roby said. “I guarantee you American scores will go up once pi is 3. It will be so much easier.”

[ This one got me...Before I saw the comments indicating it was fake I was about to quit my career and become a political activist. ]

I maintain the problem in this country is lack of regulation, a government which pimps out its people to runaway corporate monstrosities. Corporations have all the control and they use and dispose of human beings as they see fit.

We have been told the only way is a global economy, it’s really too complex for us simpletons to get it, but for real honest and truly it benefits all of us to globalize the economy. It’s good for americans to allow companies to set up shop in countries with abominable standards of living and human rights, where these corporations can pay people bullshit for the same labor.

Americans cant find jobs because companies ARE NOT HIRING AMERICANS.
If you physically produce products, the manufacturing is in some third world shithole hiring people who they can pay pennies, and merely fire when lose a hand during the manufacturing process.
If you produce a skilled service, then immigrants from the third world have immigrated here and are now working for less money, with less benefits, while you sit around with your thumb up your ass holding out for a job where you are treated like a human being. Not likely when hatians will work for nothing and tolerate standards of living which are far below that of americans.

This old man pining away about an enterprising productive spirit absent in todays young people as the cause of the current employment problem… sounds just like an old man pining away, full of utter shit. People in his generation found it easier to find work, because people in his generation didn’t have to compete with hatians working for much less in terms of monetary compensation benefits or respect. People in his generation got educated, and competed only against americans, and there were jobs in america then.

There is a reason the media (which is to say, the government/rich/corporate class) has ridiculed and satirized to unspeakability the stereotype of the disgruntled american worker who is weary of immigrants and corporations setting up manufacturing in third world dumpsters. The reason this line of thought has become a joke is because it is infuriatingly correct, and the parasite class depends on us never waking up and figuring that out.

Follow it through for the full comment.

Interesting numbers.

Some of the world’s fastest supercomputers are being set up in Hong Kong to address the age-old mystery of human intelligence.

The study of intelligence quotient (IQ) is being conducted by BGI Hong Kong, [formerly] known as the Beijing Genomics Institute. It will survey DNA samples from 1,000 child prodigies from China’s best high schools, comparing them with samples from 1,000 children of average intelligence, searching for genetic variations.

The study will examine protein coding genes of the extremely smart children, many of whom are expected to enroll at Harvard, Yale or Cambridge. The results will be correlated with each youngster’s school test scores, in hopes of learning how specific genetic variations affect intelligence.

Yet another way we’ll watch China pass us by. They’re taking over Africa, becoming a manufacturing powerhouse, and now looking into how to engineer their children to be smarter.

Meanwhile, we have Dancing With the Stars.