this n that
This is how companies are making amazing profits over the last half decade & more while the jobless rate has gone up and wages have flatlined if not declined: Serfing USA: Corporate America Is Robbing American Workers
Remember, all during that decade, companies were seeing productivity gains averaging almost 3% per year. If 50% of that gain in productivity annually had gone to workers, as might have been typical back 30 years ago when unions were stronger and before Congress gave away the store by signing onto the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Act and similar trade agreements, that high school grad would have been earning $729 a week in inflation-adjusted dollars by 2009, while the college grad would have been earning $1,195.
Why spread the wealth around when you can grab it all for yourself?
This kind of analysis amuses me: The evanescence of Twitter debates. It’s sort of like the endless “Death of the Internet: News At 11″ I can remember from 1987 onward. Usenet’s Great Renaming? Check. Compuserv and AOL gaining access to the Internet? Check. The rise of the blogosphere? Check. And now… twitter. Really, twitter makes me think of the old style Usenet more than anything else these days (although the more elaborate blogs, especially multi user/author ones like DailyKos, FDL, Pam’s House Blend and so on, really look like moderated Usenet newsgroups these days) - it just cuts the foaming and frothing down to 140 characters which actually seems to have made it a bit more useful in some ways. And when he laments that one can’t follow tweets the same way one used to follow topics on different blogs, he strikes me as going at it the wrong way. I use twitter at this point to find these same blog entries. Yeah, they’re bigger, more polished, but half the time they don’t allow commentary or moderate heavily. I understand why, but it’s often too much time for me, unless I really spend a lot of time at that blog, and only a handful qualify. But you can comment on twitter (and boost the channel for that particular post along the way), and find others doing so as well if you like. I tweet my own articles to twitter - and get the bulk of my traffic in that way. For those blogs I’m interested in, I channel their rss feeds into tweets to my account, same end result. But anyway, it’s an interesting article; the link to Wikileaks is really a sidebar to the main topic: The evanescence of Twitter debates. Really, we invented everything online 25 years ago. Since then, everything that was done then has been reinvented with new gui’s and incrementally increasing functionality within that to slowly match the functionality of, yes, 25 years ago. Sigh.
Paul Krugman: The New Voodoo. Always worth a read.
2010 marked the emergence of a new, even more profound level of magical thinking: the belief that deficits created by tax cuts just don’t matter. For example, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona - who had denounced President Obama for running deficits - declared that “you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.”
I still can’t figure out how they can possibly think the way they claim. It does make me think they’re out to deliberately sabotage this country, even though I have no idea what they would gain from ruining the U.S. But there’s no other end result from the actions they are taking.
And Digby rings in the new year nicely. How well did you do on that quiz?? Bye 2010.
Originally published at What's that you said?. You can comment here or there.