Jobs, Jobs, And More Jobs

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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This post is about jobs.

You might have guessed that from the title.

Not the late Steve, the other kind.

During the past months America has been creating approximately 200,000 jobs. At least that’s what the official figures are saying. It has helped to indicate the underlying strength of the economy, led to official unemployment figures of 5.5% and propped up the USD on the foreign exchange markets.

And no one is questioning any of it.

It’s as if it’s really real.

Again it’s all a question of what you do with the numbers.

The May 2015 figure for the labor force is 157.5 million. That is the figure the government uses to calculate it’s unemployment rate of 5.5%.

That’s what they call the ‘U3’ number. U3 is the official unemployment rate.

But there is also a ‘U5’ number that includes discouraged workers and all other marginally attached workers; and a ‘U6’ number that adds on those workers who are part-time purely for economic reasons.

Don’t ask me what happened to ‘U1’ or ‘U4’ because I don’t know. However ‘U2’ is a very successful pop group from Dublin, Ireland.

The problem is that the “official” unemployment rate (U3) does not count discouraged workers who have settled for part-time jobs or have given up looking altogether because they believe there are no jobs out there for them.

There are about another 7.5 million or so people who were not considered ‘unemployed’ because they were employed part-time for economic reasons. Those people are also called involuntary part-time workers – working part-time because their hours were cut back or because they were unable to secure a full-time job.

If you include those individuals, (the U6 number), you get a very different figure for the nation’s unemployment rate. Unlike other jobs figures, the U6 rate actually got worse in June.

So the real unemployment rate is well in excess of 12%, more than double the official figure.

But it is even worse than that.

The economy is growing, BUT it is growing slowly, and it is growing from a very low base caused by the financial crisis that the banksters brought upon us with their fraud and greed.

In that light, an increase of 200,000 jobs or so each month is basically just replacing some of the millions of jobs lost during the bank-caused recession, not creating ‘new’ jobs as such. In other words we’re just slowly getting back to where we were.

The forecasts aren’t optimistic either. If and when the workers laid off during the recent recession find new jobs and we get to what the government calls full employment, the labor force is forecast to grow at a rate of only 0.5% for the rest of this decade. At 0.5%, we grow at a rate of about 66,000 a month — nowhere near 200,000. Next decade it’s even worse, at 0.2%.

Add to that the fact that a great number of the jobs being created are government bureaucratic jobs that cost the country money, not real jobs that produce wealth for the country and you can see that there is little for the politicians to crow about.

As I noted in my post on Wednesday, with statistics you can ‘prove’ anything. Take any government figures with a great big pinch of salt.

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With Statistics You Can ‘Prove’ Anything.

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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With statistics you can prove anything.

Take global warming for example.

Although Al Gore blatantly exploited the global warming theory to make himself millions of dollars in one of the biggest scams in recent history, the real inconvenient truth about the guff he was peddling was that the statistical evidence didn’t back up what he was saying.

That was a BIG problem for his credibility and for the credibility of the pseudo-scientists who had grabbed on to his coattails to try to make a name for themselves also.

There were only two possible things they could do.

(1) admit they had got it wrong,

or

(2) change the statistics.

Of course, door number (1) meant telling the truth, so they chose door number (2).

They changed the statistics.

Basically what the pseudo-scientists have now done is made the inconvenient “pause” in global warming disappear.

In a new paper published by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) they now estimate that global temperature during the period 1998 to 2012 increased twice as fast as all other estimates had calculated.

Of course, their new study stays well clear of six of the seven temperature sets used by climate scientists and instead uses the one regarded as problematic, the one shunned even by the UK’s own Met Office.

How they think they can get away with such crap is beyond me.

What they have done this time is just make the numbers up as they need them. Where instrument readings didn’t exist, for example for the Arctic, they stuck in a ‘guess’ of what they would have been, a ‘guess’ that would be sure to support the conclusion they wanted to reach.

Past temperatures like the HOT 1930s have been erased and other figures ‘massaged’ to emphasize recent warming.

The whole thing is another big fraud to manipulate the public who invariably believe whatever they are told by supposedly ‘learned’ sources and to give unscrupulous governments the ammunition they need to introduce more unnecessary legislation and taxes.

Facts, like the almost two decade long pause in global warming, are officially accepted by organizations like the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), but you would never know it if you read any of their reports because this type of information is buried so deep within it that hardly anyone sees it.

So if you ignore reality and make up your own numbers you can indeed prove anything with statistics.

In fact….

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Playing With Statistics

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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It’s Sunday so time for another Sunday Sermon.

There’s a famous quote from US President Abraham Lincoln that goes something like, “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time”.

On the face of it Lincoln’s words seem rather clever and profound – and true. And so they are.

Up to a point.

But what Lincoln didn’t say (and he was a politician after all) is that you don’t have to fool ALL of the people ALL of the time.

What you have to do is fool them long enough to do what you need to do – for example, in the case of a politician, to get yourself elected.  

 

Which brings me to statistics.

Because the best people in the world at playing with statistics are politicians and governments.

Some people believe everything they are told. Others call the figures governments produce ‘disingenuous’ which is being very kind. And some don’t believe a word or a number that they produce. (Take a wild guess at which camp I am in.)

Government statistical results are in effect lies. You can’t call them that – although I just did – because they can find figures to back up what they say, it’s just that they choose the figures that tell the story they want to promote and ignore all the rest that tell a different story.

For example, to get on to one of my favorite rant subjects, there is a thing which I am sure most of you have never heard of called the ‘Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program’ or ‘SIGTARP’ for short.

When the government is challenged about what is has been doing to bring to justice the banksters, who stole and recklessly gambled away our money, they can quote you a statistic or two saying that over the last few years, SIGTARP has put over 100 senior bank executives in jail, each of whom was convicted of stealing from taxpayers.

Although that fact is ‘technically’ or ‘statistically’ true, what they don’t tell you is that the people they have gone after and convicted are all small time crooks, guilty of small time frauds that are seldom above $1m or $1.5 million in value.

All the super crooks who embezzled hundreds of $ billions and almost brought down the entire financial system aren’t even being seriously pursued. More than six years into the SIGTARP investigations there are literally still hundreds of billions of outstanding ‘loans’, from banks including Citi, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America.

They can quote figures all day long to try to mislead the people and make themselves look good, but a few small time crooks thrown in jail for stealing a million or two dollars here and there isn’t ever going to make much of a dent in the $ billions that were stolen. The politicians know that as well as anyone.

Perhaps Mark Twain’s “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” might have been a better quote!

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Did They Really Mean To Say That? Newspaper Headlines Nightmares, Part Five!!!!!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Some more newspaper headlines today.

It’s quite amazing the capacity people have to get things wrong.

Worse if the result is on view to the general public.

Here is the latest batch.

Enjoy.

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Forget That The Criminals Are The Problem – Let’s Attack The Decent Law-Abiding People

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Time for a bit of a rant today.

First one this year, I don’t know how I held out for so long.

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Since the horrible massacre of schoolchildren and their teachers by a mentally deranged moron in Connecticut the real debate has again been sidelined into the convenient ‘to-ban-or-not-to-ban’ guns.

I can’t make up my mind as to what proportion of the gun-banning side of this so-called debate are idiots repeating what other idiots have said, how many are malicious, or how many are people trying to grab a handy headline or two.

The first lot can be easily compared with a flock of sheep. Sheep aren’t noted for their intellectual prowess, nor their debating skills, but when one sheep goes “baaa” you can be sure a lot more will say the same thing.

The second lot, the malicious ones, are deliberately rather than unintentionally refocusing the debate on to their liberal/fascist agenda of increasing bureaucratic interference wherever they see an opening.

And the third group are people, usually politicians or those with a political agenda, using the misery of other people to publicize themselves and their cause, but primarily themselves. Never one to let a band wagon roll past him, President Obama has jumped on this one, all guns blazing as it were!

For all these groups the ‘to-ban-or-not-to-ban’ guns debate is a handy, and a welcome, distraction.

It gives the first group something to say without stopping to analyze the real problem in detail. It gives the second group more ammunition (no pun intended today) to curtail freedom. As for the later group, the politicians love this distraction because it gives the impression that they are compassionate and caring and trying to find a solution, even though they are addressing the wrong problem.

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On the face of it, Obama’s proposals can be dressed up as reasonable. If you haven’t seen them on the media (how could you avoid it?) they include:  

• asking Congress to reinstate and strengthen a ban on the sale and production of assault weapons that passed in 1994 and expired in 2004;
• a ban on the sale and production of magazines with more than 10 rounds, like those used in Newtown and other mass shootings;
• criminal background checks for all gun sales, closing the longstanding loophole that allows buyers to avoid screening by purchasing weapons from unlicensed sellers at gun shows or in private sales;
• banning the possession or transfer of armor-piercing bullets;
• and cracking down on “straw purchasers,” i.e., those who pass background checks and then forward guns to criminals or others forbidden from purchasing them.

As I said, on the face of it reasonable, but I suspect this is just the first salvo of a much more comprehensive agenda.

However, the question of the moment is simply this  –  would a gun ban, whether partial or comprehensive, work?

And the answer is categorically, NO!

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And the answer is ‘NO’, not because I am a champion of the 2nd Amendment – I’m not, it doesn’t even apply to me! The answer is ‘NO’ because taking guns away from law abiding people won’t stop the criminals or those with criminal intent.

It doesn’t take a genius to work that out, but no one in the gun-ban lobby is even asking that fundamental question. Nor do they want it to be asked!  

You see this is how gun bans work. I’ve seen them in operation in numerous countries.

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If gun ownership is banned, law-abiding Joe Public won’t be able to go to Walmart and buy a gun as before. And he won’t be able to buy his gun because all that gun-banning legislation does is to make sure that no law-abiding citizen can buy and hold a legal firearm.

Joe Public is buying his gun (99.99 percent of the time) because he uses it for sporting purposes, or because he is a collector, or because he feels he needs it for his protection and the protection of his family.

The criminals, on the other hand, who don’t shop at Walmart, but are more likely to deal out of the trunk of a car in some isolated spot well away from prying eyes, will still be able to buy their guns and use them how they please.

Why?

Because they buy illegal guns from illegal dealers. And illegal guns from illegal dealers are not part of these new proposals. As a matter of fact the illegal guns are already banned which in itself proves that banning does not work! 

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So what has to be the inevitable result of a ban on legally held weapons?

Simply this. When you ban law-abiding decent citizens from buying or owning guns all you can possibly end up with are armed criminals versus unarmed civilians, with the police (who would have been used by the politicians and bureaucrats to subjugate the law-abiding population and remove their protection) now being the only form of defense and they will be grossly inadequate in numbers to ever hope to do so effectively.

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As another example of just how far up their own asses some people can stick their heads and still think they are getting a tan, an idiot reporter named Dwight R Worley of the New York Journal News recently published the names and addresses, complete with an interactive map, of people in Westchester and Rockland Counties who owned legally held firearms.

Like all such journalistic crap it was parceled up in ‘caring for the community’ and ‘public interest’ wrappers, but all this article did was to point an accusing finger at law abiding citizens who had done nothing wrong.

Well, when I say “all it achieved” that’s not quite accurate, because it also gave the thieves, the home invaders, the rapists, the thugs, etc., a map of the homes that were protected BUT equally the homes that were not.  

Thanks to dickhead Dwight R Worley (who incidently owns a .357 Magnum himself adding the crime of hypocrisy to his stupidity), Mr. Thief and Mr. Mayhem now know which houses in Westchester and Rockland Counties they can attack with impunity and those that they should stay clear of.

As it turns out, the people who should be most upset by this article are the ones who don’t have a gun, not those who do!

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Zip this forward to a gun-ban country where all the law abiding people are defenseless targets for the criminals and there can only be one result. Not just an increase in violent crime but also a vast increase in petty crime. The detection rate for the latter is already minuscule, so think for a moment what it will be like when the criminals have little fear of their victims and even less fear of being caught.

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The truth is that legally held guns probably save many, many more lives than they harm, and in most cases they do so without ever being used. But there aren’t any statistics for that.

The truth is that banning legal weapons will not stop illegal gangland shootings, which constitute the vast majority of deaths by gunfire in the United States.

The truth is that banning legal weapons won’t decrease the number of illegal weapons in circulation.

And the truth is that banning legally held weapons won’t stop morons or mentally deranged individuals from going on a murder spree – a knife, a bow or a can of gasoline will get the same job done.

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The saddest thing of all is that the people and politicians who are calling for these bans know it. It would be nice to see them show a bit of backbone and integrity for once and attack the criminals and leave the law-abiding people alone. But don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen. 

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We’ve Looked At Beautiful Numbers, Now How About Some Really BIG ones!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Taking a break from the funny stuff today.

A while ago I did a post about Beautiful Numbers. And yesterday I was having a look at the debt situation in various countries, which sparked off this post about numbers, BIG ones.

I will post links to the US debt figures and a couple of others at the end of this post. They are kind of fascinating because they are real-time counters, continually updating.

However, to get on with the post, everybody knows 1 (one), 10 (ten), 100 (hundred), 1,000 (thousand), and 1,000,000 (million). We are all familiar with 1,000,000,000 (billion) although none of us have ever counted that far. In fact oil mogul John Paul Getty once said that if you could count your money you weren’t a billionaire. I can, and I’m not, so perhaps he was right!

And, thanks to the massive debt that the US and other countries are building up, we are also getting more and more familiar with 1,000,000,000,000 trillion.

After that, however, most people would be stuck. Here are the next big numbers.

1,000,000,000,000,000 quadrillion

1,000,000,000,000,000,000 quintillion

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 sextillion

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 septillion

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 octillion

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 nonillion

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 decillion

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 vigintillion

10¹⁰⁰ better known as a googol from which the search engine google derived its name.

10³⁰³ centillion

And finally for now, a googolplex which is 10^googol

That’s a lot of zeros!

You may have noticed in all this that the names for a lot of the larger numbers end in “illion”. This is also true for the names used to describe numbers that don’t actually exist and that are of no specific size.

For example, words like , ‘jillion’, ‘gadzillion’ and ‘squillion’ (there are many other variations). Their size is dependent upon the context, but can typically be considered a very very large number. And if you are talking about the super rich then all you have to do is stick ‘-illionaire’ on the end.

But the best term for describing a number is one that also doesn’t really exist. I mean it exists as a word, but it is not a precise mathematical term and it just describes a big number rather than a specific big number.

The term I’m talking about is ‘Umpteen’. From the name you would imagine that it should represent a number somewhere in the teens, but it can be used to describe virtually any number, real or imaginary. A useful term if you don’t have a specific number in mind.

Now for the clocks. Here are the links. Hope you find them interesting, maybe a little scary in some cases.

Probably the best of these is from the wonderfully named poodwaddle.com

http://www.poodwaddle.com/clocks/worldclock/

Some others to look at too if you are interested in this type of thing

US Debt clock   http://www.usdebtclock.org/index.html

World Debt Clock   http://www.usdebtclock.org/world-debt-clock.html

And some real time world counters on a variety of things

http://www.worldometers.info/

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Statistical Summer Saturday

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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A day for fasab factoid fans.

Here is a selection of statistics and odd facts that I hope you find interesting. 

 

 

If she were life-size Barbie’s measurements would be 39-23-33

 

Coca-cola was originally green

 

The Hawaiian alphabet has 12 letters

 

The first novel ever written on a typewriter was “Tom Sawyer”

 

Why do you need a driver’s license to buy liquor in America when you can’t drink and drive?

 

There are more collect calls on Father’s Day than any other day of the year

 

Heinz Catsup leaving the bottle travels at 25 miles PER YEAR

 

It is possible to lead a cow upstairs but not downstairs

 

Why are there interstate highways in Hawaii?

 

Men get hiccups more often than women

 

Men can read smaller print than women; women can hear better

 

The chances that an American lives within 50 miles of where he/she grew up are 1 in 2.

 

The amount American Airlines saved in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first class was $440,000

 

The city with the most Rolls Royces per capita is Hong Kong

 

The State with the highest percentage of people who walk to work is Alaska

 

How does the guy who drives the snowplow get to work in the mornings?

 

The chances of a white Christmas in New York are 1 in 4

 

The portion of US annual rainfall that falls in April is 1/12

 

28 percent of Africa is wilderness

 

38 percent of North America is wilderness

 

An estimated 44 percent of American adults go on a diet each year

 

43 percent of Americans regularly attend religious services

 

The city with the highest per capita viewership of TV evangelists is Washington DC

 

80 percent of American men say they would marry the same woman if they had it to do all over again

 

50 percent of American women say they would marry the same man

 

58 percent of men say they are happier after their divorce or separation

 

85 percent of women say they are happier

 

Hallmark makes cards for 105 different familial relationships

 

The average number of people airborne over the US any given hour is 61,000

 

70 percent of Americans have visited Disneyland or Disney World

 

The average life span of a major league baseball is 7 pitches

 

1/3 of all ice cream sold is vanilla

 

1/3 of potatoes sold are French-fried

 

7 percent of Americans eat at McDonalds each day

 

90 percent of bird species are monogamous

 

3 percent of mammal species are monogamous

 

Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations?

 

If 7-11 is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, why are there locks on the doors?

 

 

 

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