Random Saturday

Well, first up, I'm slow getting up to date with my friends blogs, but, uh, all around hoopy frood Mer Haskell can has agent! You go Mer.

The news organizations continue to plumb the depths of stupidity. The latest fun-ness is an intense focus on employment numbers and how that shows the economy is still crappy. Well, it is. But employment is a trailing-indicator. As the economy goes bad, companies hang on to employees hoping either they won't be affected, or that they can make it through the rough patch. Hiring people is damn expensive, as is training them. It's better to loose a little money to keep good employees in place (because you'll probably lose more through lay-offs and rehires). Then, as the economy gets better, it's cheaper to work your existing employees harder than hire in more employees. Because the uptick may also be a temporary phenomenon. So jobs lag behind the actual economy. I don't say this because I like it, hell I'm about to be hurt by it (and I have friends who are being hurt by it, some very badly).

So, for all those "economic experts" certain news organizations like to have on who point to the jobs market and talk about how we're not around the corner and even though all the major numbers they track say the economy has found the bottom (the housing market, not so much, but it's close) and are all doom and gloom because their road-killed ideology is being kicked to the side of the road, you're full of crap. We're before, are now. Now to be clear, even though I think we've found the bottom, the rebound isn't going to be fast.

And thinking of the economy and jobs, the good people over at Energy Tomorrow, that think tank of marketing manipulation (whose message pretty much is "Oh dear God, please don't regulate or tax us or well take you all with us") has a new commercial out about how they're going to put our economy back on track and create all these jobs because they're gonna drill and make us independent. Um, yeah. Money talks, suckers walk, dudes. Have you restarted the fabrication plants to create these off shore oil derricks (that we only need one to exploit what we used to need ten to exploit)? Have you hired these legions of people to start drilling on all those lands you hold leases to? Have you increased domestic production by anything more than 2% in the past decade (and here I'm talking about total output, not new production to replace tapped out fields)? Do you have the capacity to put those people top work now? Yeah, didn't think so.

It appears we're going to go back to a rash of shootings and other bad personal behavior. I've been dreading this. It's a well known canard that crime goes up during recessions (domestic crime does go up, as does white collar crime, but violent crime actually goes down a little as does robberies, however it's mostly amateurs that do the robberies, which leads to higher conviction rates). But spectacular crime goes up. As the amateurs pattern their crimes after TV and movies and try and grab a lot of attention, professionals keep to the shadows and don't go for flash. There's also been a growing trend of wack-a-loon feeding (like feeding the trolls) from those main stream news organizations and talk shows that like to think they aren't main stream press. I expect (although dread) there will be some school shootings. There will be more police shootings because a pattern is being set. The freeze dried wack-a-loons of the world are nothing if they aren't intense media consumers and they're always looking for templates to play out their own twisted fears. It's something that keeps me up at night.