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Former New Jersey Superior Court judge and Fox News contributor Judge Andrew Nepalitano has written an interesting opinion piece: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/06/20/president-obama-attorney-general-holder-and-executive-privilege/
Interesting bit:
The only bases for the invocation of the privilege are the need to protect secret deliberations and communications intended ultimately for the president that pertain to (a) military, or (b) diplomatic, or (c) sensitive national security matters. Just because two or more people in the White House discussed a matter or reviewed documents does not clothe their discussion or their document review with executive privilege. The conversation or document review must be integral to advising the president on his official duties, and it must fit into one or more of (a) or (b) or (c) above.
The invocation of the privilege can only be made by the president himself. Thus, President Obama will need to articulate and explain into which category--(a) or (b) or (c) above--his claim of privilege falls, and he will need to do so personally, either in person or in writing. The mere request by the attorney general for the president to invoke the privilege does not lawfully invoke it. As of this writing, the president has not yet done this.
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On June 21 2012 14:36 TheToast wrote:
That's somewhat misleading. While many manufacturing jobs have moved overseas, many have simply been eliminated due to increasing automation. There's plenty of skilled manufacturing jobs in this country, in fact many employers in some parts of the country are constantly scrambling to find skilled welders and die makers. I saw a news story last week about the Manitowac ship building company in north eastern Wisconsin. They've got a bunch of major navy contracts and can barely fulfill them because of the lack of skill welders in the area. I've got a friend from high school who went into custom machining work, he's been doing pretty darn well for himself. Depending on where you are, there are still plenty of skilled manufacturing jobs in many areas.
What there aren't are unskilled manufacturing jobs; that is jobs which require no education or training. Those jobs are gone and they're never coming back. It's simply not economical to pay someone 30k + benefits to do repetitive monkey work and it never will be again. Especially when workers try to unionize and cause trouble, it's simply not worth trying to keep those jobs here. That's not to say there aren't disadvantages to moving jobs overseas; greatly increased lead times, legal issues, and shipping costs do hurt. But the labor is so cheap and you don't have to worry about unions causing issues that it makes sense. If you were to bring the jobs back, any reasonable company would increase automation to the point where few workers are needed. The few remaining steel mills in the US are almost entirely automated; some mid sized ones have only about a dozen people working in them. The "good" manufacturing jobs of the 60s and 70s are a thing of the past.
That's very true but I believe there is still a sizable workforce of manufacturing still needed. Automation is surely the greatest opponent of the modern manufacturer, with technology advancing it is trend that is to continue as it always has. But then again those machines need repair and maintenance, and could be done by the same people. I think in the end it's still important to have large industries no matter what they are and who operate them. We export far too little even for a ultra service based country like ours. I suppose a solution would be to ramp up production of desirable goods and self consumption of said goods. Cars are a good example, but are tarnished by external factors like unions. That's why right to work states like South Carolina has a large work force seeking jobs and a demand for those candidates.
It would really take too much either, as Germany seems pretty solid as a manufacturer with a 33% occupation in industry vs the United States's 22%. Then again Germany has been for so long an industrial giant.
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There's plenty of new forms of manufacture that we would be well-served to develop. Finance and expensive healthcare seem to be our priorities right now though.
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On June 21 2012 13:07 smarty pants wrote:Show nested quote +On June 21 2012 12:57 DoubleReed wrote:
Hahahahaha, you think the government actually controls our infrastructure? You're hilarious. We have almost exclusively a privatized government system. Private companies build and maintain our infrastructure, licensed and supported by the government as necessary. This has been the case for a looong time now.
This idea that private companies are more efficient and magically better is total bullshit, by the way. The private sector can have horrible inefficiencies compared the government. People just tend to ignore some of the serious issues that the private sector can have so that they can continue lambasting how terrible government is. Don't get me wrong, the government can be pretty bad too, I just want some realism here. What I bolded is obvious, Mr Sherlock. It's what I've said. And your second part is so incredibly ridiculous I think you are trolling. You really have to be screwing with me here if you think the private sector has horrible inefficiencies compared to the government. They are not able to do so without government being cozy with them because they would lose their price and quality advantage that they must maintain in order to be competitive If you want realism, wake up bud.
LOL, so you think that the private sector is a bunch of magical pixies that make things go faster? I'm not sure if you read what I wrote.
But clearly your thought process can only go as far as "government = bad" so I can stop taking you seriously. So adorable.
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The private sector consists of too many short-sighted people who care nothing for anything but their quarterly profits. Morality and long-term efficiency be damned.
If we'd let them, businesses would re-enact the Gilded Age all over again. Standard Oil, US Steel, JP Morgan rise again!
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On June 21 2012 15:58 smarty pants wrote:Show nested quote +On June 21 2012 14:36 TheToast wrote:
That's somewhat misleading. While many manufacturing jobs have moved overseas, many have simply been eliminated due to increasing automation. There's plenty of skilled manufacturing jobs in this country, in fact many employers in some parts of the country are constantly scrambling to find skilled welders and die makers. I saw a news story last week about the Manitowac ship building company in north eastern Wisconsin. They've got a bunch of major navy contracts and can barely fulfill them because of the lack of skill welders in the area. I've got a friend from high school who went into custom machining work, he's been doing pretty darn well for himself. Depending on where you are, there are still plenty of skilled manufacturing jobs in many areas.
What there aren't are unskilled manufacturing jobs; that is jobs which require no education or training. Those jobs are gone and they're never coming back. It's simply not economical to pay someone 30k + benefits to do repetitive monkey work and it never will be again. Especially when workers try to unionize and cause trouble, it's simply not worth trying to keep those jobs here. That's not to say there aren't disadvantages to moving jobs overseas; greatly increased lead times, legal issues, and shipping costs do hurt. But the labor is so cheap and you don't have to worry about unions causing issues that it makes sense. If you were to bring the jobs back, any reasonable company would increase automation to the point where few workers are needed. The few remaining steel mills in the US are almost entirely automated; some mid sized ones have only about a dozen people working in them. The "good" manufacturing jobs of the 60s and 70s are a thing of the past.
That's very true but I believe there is still a sizable workforce of manufacturing still needed. Automation is surely the greatest opponent of the modern manufacturer, with technology advancing it is trend that is to continue as it always has. But then again those machines need repair and maintenance, and could be done by the same people. I think in the end it's still important to have large industries no matter what they are and who operate them. We export far too little even for a ultra service based country like ours. I suppose a solution would be to ramp up production of desirable goods and self consumption of said goods. Cars are a good example, but are tarnished by external factors like unions. That's why right to work states like South Carolina has a large work force seeking jobs and a demand for those candidates. It would really take too much either, as Germany seems pretty solid as a manufacturer with a 33% occupation in industry vs the United States's 22%. Then again Germany has been for so long an industrial giant.
(to the bolded part) I agree, but those would be skilled jobs that would require some training or education. The point I'm trying to make is that the era of the high paying unskilled factory job is over.
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On June 21 2012 13:54 Signet wrote:Show nested quote +On June 21 2012 13:35 Danglars wrote:
Yeah, gotta take into account those that really want to find a full time job, but can't find it, so forced to accept a part time position with the accompanying lifestyle change. Companies in some sectors respond to a poor economic climate by laying off full-time workers and offering increased part-time positions (as well as increasing the responsibilities of full-time workers). U6 is a means of estimating how people seeking full time employment settle for part time.
I think that's useful to track, but I wouldn't count someone without a job and someone working 30 hours a week who wants to work 40 as equally underutilized. From the other angle, you could really argue that it's the jobs to total working age population ratio that really measures economic strength. ie, just because somebody becomes a grad student doesn't mean the economy is any healthier than if that person simply didn't have a job. There is no perfect measure of unemployment, and a simplified number will always overcount or undercount in some sense. What's important is the movement of that number and how it compares to the same number's long-run averages or value in other developed economies. Show nested quote +On June 21 2012 13:39 smarty pants wrote:
I wouldn't doubt a correlation of retraction in the economy and a high U-6 rate. I wouldn't doubt that this is true for U1 through U5 as well. All unemployment metrics should rise during a recession.
It doesn't matter what is tracked as long as these unemployment measures are highly correlated, which they very much are as you can see from the graph below (U6 is red, U3 is blue).
That's because of the idea of maximum employment and the NAIRU. Say, maximum employment is 4.5% for U3, which corresponds to, say, 8% for U6. Then it's noninformative to quote a 14% U6 now, just for shock value, because the U6 at maximum employment is still 8%.
Thus, using U3 or U6 is simply a matter of semantics, there really isn't a difference in terms of real world economics. Because of this, U3 should be use because it's the international standard, U6 is just for shock value because it's higher.
![[image loading]](http://unemploymentdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/U6-Unemployment2.jpg)
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On June 21 2012 13:32 smarty pants wrote:Show nested quote +On June 21 2012 13:25 Signet wrote:There are a lot of different metrics of unemployment. U-3 (what you cited) is the most commonly used, it's definition has remained pretty constant over time, and Eurostat uses a similar definition which produces a close result to what the US reports for itself. So yes, it should be clear that the unemployment rate isn't being "manipulated" in some devious or conspiratorial sense. However, there are other metrics of unemployment, the broadest of which (and this counts some part-time workers towards the total, so it's really broad) is 14.8% right now. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm Wrong. The ILO is the organization that gives the definitions to the different measurements which has changed the definition, and it has not been "pretty constant over time".
Source please.
When did the ILO change it's definition. I couldn't find anything in my few minutes of googling.
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Did republicans already started with their "hot button issues" ? Things like religion, abortion, contraception and of course GUNS? Trying to shine with relevant stuff to suppress major subjects.
I am scared of this election... „Citizens United vs.Federal Election Commission“...now politic = big money :S
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This election is almost all economy, really. That takes up 85% of each nominee's campaign.
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y but know nobody know who gives money and how much. and this is a problem, what if republican get 200 million from a drug dealer. nobody will know and this is not good. just an example.
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On June 22 2012 00:59 tadL wrote:
y but know nobody know who gives money and how much. and this is a problem, what if republican get 200 million from a drug dealer. nobody will know and this is not good. just an example.
What? You do realize that by law all political contributions have to be reported as public data by the campaign and go into a publically searchable interent database. You can look up anyone who gave money to a campaign for any candidate in the 2008 presidential campaign.
Failure to report such information would be very illegal and could get a campaign into major trouble.
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If the private sector is so much more efficient, why don't we just run the government more like the private sector?
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On June 22 2012 01:14 sam!zdat wrote:
If the private sector is so much more efficient, why don't we just run the government more like the private sector?
We would if we could have our way. The problem is that it is very difficult to change and replace decades of "public sector culture." If I were king, I'd start with the public school system and go from there.
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Can you do it without making it all about profit for individuals? How do you ensure the interests of the people and the interest of these entities align?
edit: This is not a rhetorical question.
edit: because the problem is that "privatization" is just opening up the public sector to private exploitation, not making it more efficient.
edit: Another way to think about it, can you do this while still having it be "government" and not "corporations"
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On June 22 2012 01:31 sam!zdat wrote:
Can you do it without making it all about profit for individuals? How do you ensure the interests of the people and the interest of these entities align?
edit: This is not a rhetorical question.
Why would I want to eliminate individual incentive (or using your terms, "not make it all about profit for individuals")? The whole idea behind private enterprise is to give employees financial incentives to better their employer, thereby furthering the enterprise.
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Employers will screw over their employees without a second thought if it would be more profitable. This has been proven many, many times throughout history.
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On June 22 2012 01:42 Lightwip wrote:
Employers will screw over their employees without a second thought if it would be more profitable. This has been proven many, many times throughout history.
So what? I could also say that employers get rid of lazy employees that are not productive enough to warrant the compensation that employers give those employees.
The purpose of private enterprise is not to give jobs to people and pay them. The purpose of private enterprise is to be profitable, and the employment of people is incidental to that goal.
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On June 22 2012 01:46 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On June 22 2012 01:42 Lightwip wrote:
Employers will screw over their employees without a second thought if it would be more profitable. This has been proven many, many times throughout history. So what? I could also say that employers get rid of lazy employees that are not productive enough to warrant the compensation that employers give those employees. The purpose of private enterprise is not to give jobs to people and pay them. The purpose of private enterprise is to be profitable, and the employment of people is incidental to that goal.
Which often is not the socially optimal solution. The exact reason why government involvement is necessary.
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On June 22 2012 01:53 Lightwip wrote:Show nested quote +On June 22 2012 01:46 xDaunt wrote:On June 22 2012 01:42 Lightwip wrote:
Employers will screw over their employees without a second thought if it would be more profitable. This has been proven many, many times throughout history. So what? I could also say that employers get rid of lazy employees that are not productive enough to warrant the compensation that employers give those employees. The purpose of private enterprise is not to give jobs to people and pay them. The purpose of private enterprise is to be profitable, and the employment of people is incidental to that goal. Which often is not the socially optimal solution. The exact reason why government involvement is necessary.
...which is not what we are talking about.
The question posed is whether it would be good idea run the public sector more like the private sector, and my argument is "yes."
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EPT
