US Economy begins to thrash

Post #166,668 by tuberculosis 7/29/04 2:58:15 PM Reply	US Economy begins to thrash To me it looks less like a recovery and more like spasms rippling through the mortally wounded. [link\|http://www.fibre2fashion.com/news/NewsDetails.asp?News_id=8402\|http://www.fibre2fas....asp?News_id=8402] [link\|http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22076-2004Jul28.html\|http://www.washingto...76-2004Jul28.html] The overall employment picture continued to improve, though it varied greatly by occupation and region, and wage gains remained modest. The San Francisco district, which includes much of the West Coast, reported shortages of skilled workers in a number of industries, including construction, manufacturing, financial services and technology services. A St. Louis district aerospace company plans to train former autoworkers. Nurses in the Minneapolis area are getting wage increases. Truckers are in high demand across the country, commanding higher wages in some places. But staffing companies in the Philadelphia district said most of their clients are adding workers only as "staffing needs become pressing." The Cleveland district said "few firms reported any significant hiring plans for the remainder of 2004." Some areas also reported plant closings and layoffs. A call center in North Dakota will close at least temporarily in August, while a computer plant in South Dakota was closed in June. Most districts reported strengthening labor markets, with some of the best conditions found in the New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis and Richmond districts. Richmond includes the Baltimore-Washington area. The weakest job reports came from the Boston, Cleveland and Dallas districts. That was lovely cheese. --Wallace, The Wrong Trousers
Post #166,682 by dmcarls 7/29/04 4:42:07 PM Reply	And another.....The Unbearable Costs of Empire [link\|http://biz.yahoo.com/bizwk/040729/nf200407299971_db045_1.html\|http://biz.yahoo.com...9971_db045_1.html]
Post #166,683 by FuManChu 7/29/04 4:43:30 PM Reply	It pays to be number 2. :/ Canada is looking awfully attractive lately.
Post #166,684 by deSitter 7/29/04 5:04:56 PM Reply	Re: It pays to be number 2. :/ We could be #1 and solvent - we made these problems for ourselves with stupid, asinine foregin policy and wasteful use of our own people in the name of idiotic, bullshit, Puritan "order". We have frozen out all our creative impluse in the manic, insane effort to force PC crapola and law&order down everyone's throat - in other words, we're committing suicide by pointless, groundless abstraction. A country like this deserves to fail. "Thou shalt not commit hubris". -drl
Post #166,687 by FuManChu 7/29/04 5:26:00 PM Reply	Part of me wants to agree. ..but a larger part of me is rapidly approaching the conclusion that any group larger than 50 million people is inherently unstable. Hmm, that's not quite right--more like: the larger, the more unstable, but the 50 million-mark might be critical mass. From a big enough perspective, it always reduces to "only a matter of time".
Post #166,690 by ben_tilly 7/29/04 5:33:35 PM Reply	The critical size is much smaller than that Much smaller civilizations have destroyed themselves. For instance Easter Island cut down all of their forests, even though they knew that they would inevitably starve after they did so. You have instability in any group which is large enough that most people (through a tragedy of the commons) are willing to spend virtually no energy on public goods. Cheers, Ben To deny the indirect purchaser, who in this case is the ultimate purchaser, the right to seek relief from unlawful conduct, would essentially remove the word consumer from the Consumer Protection Act - [link\|http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?NewsID=1246&Page=1&pagePos=20\|Nebraska Supreme Court]

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