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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (834451)	2/5/2015 12:57:19 PM
From: i-node	3 Recommendations Recommended By Brumar89 FJB locogringo Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1577589

I'm posting this again for reference by liberals who seem to think the current economy is good and getting great. The Big Lie: 5.6% Unemployment by Jim Clifton Here's something that many Americans -- including some of the smartest and most educated among us -- don't know: The official unemployment rate, as reported by the U.S. Department of Labor, is extremely misleading. Right now, we're hearing much celebrating from the media, the White House and Wall Street about how unemployment is "down" to 5.6%. The cheerleading for this number is deafening. The media loves a comeback story, the White House wants to score political points and Wall Street would like you to stay in the market. None of them will tell you this: If you, a family member or anyone is unemployed and has subsequently given up on finding a job -- if you are so hopelessly out of work that you've stopped looking over the past four weeks -- the Department of Labor doesn't count you as unemployed. That's right. While you are as unemployed as one can possibly be, and tragically may never find work again, you are not counted in the figure we see relentlessly in the news -- currently 5.6%. Right now, as many as 30 million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed. Trust me, the vast majority of them aren't throwing parties to toast "falling" unemployment. There's another reason why the official rate is misleading. Say you're an out-of-work engineer or healthcare worker or construction worker or retail manager: If you perform a minimum of one hour of work in a week and are paid at least $20 -- maybe someone pays you to mow their lawn -- you're not officially counted as unemployed in the much-reported 5.6%. Few Americans know this. Yet another figure of importance that doesn't get much press: those working part time but wanting full-time work. If you have a degree in chemistry or math and are working 10 hours part time because it is all you can find -- in other words, you are severely underemployed -- the government doesn't count you in the 5.6%. Few Americans know this. There's no other way to say this. The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie. And it's a lie that has consequences, because the great American dream is to have a good job, and in recent years, America has failed to deliver that dream more than it has at any time in recent memory. A good job is an individual's primary identity, their very self-worth, their dignity -- it establishes the relationship they have with their friends, community and country. When we fail to deliver a good job that fits a citizen's talents, training and experience, we are failing the great American dream. Gallup defines a good job as 30+ hours per week for an organization that provides a regular paycheck. Right now, the U.S. is delivering at a staggeringly low rate of 44%, which is the number of full-time jobs as a percent of the adult population, 18 years and older. We need that to be 50% and a bare minimum of 10 million new, good jobs to replenish America's middle class. I hear all the time that "unemployment is greatly reduced, but the people aren't feeling it." When the media, talking heads, the White House and Wall Street start reporting the truth -- the percent of Americans in good jobs; jobs that are full time and real -- then we will quit wondering why Americans aren't "feeling" something that doesn't remotely reflect the reality in their lives. And we will also quit wondering what hollowed out the middle class. Jim Clifton is Chairman and CEO at Gallup.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (834451)	2/5/2015 12:58:03 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577589

A study of GHCN V3 homogeneity adjustments. From time to time, bloggers discover that GHCN produces an adjusted temperature file, and are shocked to find that in the process, temperatures are altered. A noted example occurred in late 2009, when Willis Eschenbach became excited about GHCN V2 adjustments to the temperature at Darwin. He intoned sternly: Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style ... they are indisputable evidence that the "homogenized" data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.This created quite a stir, and drew a response from no less than the Economist, among others. It also drew a response from me - in fact, it was the stimulus to start this blog. I showed (following Giorgio Gilestro) that the V2 adjustments could be quite large, but were fairly balanced overall in trend effect. Darwin was an outlier, and I showed one case in particular which went in the opposite direction, to a greater extent. So now an adjusted version of V3 is out, and there was a similar discovery at WUWT. This time it was Iceland, particularly Reykjavik, and I wrote about that particular case here. There were similar thunderings about rewriting of history etc (and calls for legal sanctions etc). What these protesters are reluctant to acknowledge is that GHCN has always produced two files - one unadjusted, one adjusted. The unadjusted file is not altered, and has at least until recently been the prime reference source. The adjusted file is derived from it using what seems at the time to be the best available algorithm. This changes. etc, etc moyhu.blogspot.com here are all the stations. Google Maps App showing GHCN adjustments. The current blog fuss seems to be about GHCN adjustments in Paraguay (see here, here, here). These things are mechanically contrived. There have been for a long time published a GHCN file of unadjusted monthly averages, and a file of homogenised data for calculating spatial averages. Anyone, when the mood takes them, can go through and find in the 7280 GHCN stations, some that have been adjusted upwards. This seems to happen about annually. Three years ago, it was Iceland. moyhu.blogspot.com