I'm surrounded by young people trying to get the jobs they trained for. Or trying to get any job at all. And not just the very young: I have folks around me who are closer to forty than thirty, well-educated, well-trained, successfully employed in the past, who can't get work in their field or any other. Even the terrible jobs are ridiculously ( Read more... )

Adrian Moore, from the Koch Brothers-funded magazine "Reason," doesn't think that unskilled laborers should expect to make a living from their work (link goes to Crooks and Liars' Video Cafe ( Read more... )

So Wednesday, in West, Texas, an explosion killed at least fourteen people (I expect the number to rise as I believe that people are still missing). The explosion was the result of criminal behavior: the fertilizer plant that exploded was operated without a safety plan for years, and had been cited for unsafe practices, which as far as I can tell ( Read more... )

An explanation of why the cost-of-living discussion seems so divorced from reality.

The article I got it from, which tells us what we already knew about why people don't buy as much these days as the retailers want us to.Really, you can't just keep on taking money out of the system, and laying people off, and cutting their wages, and cutting off ( Read more... )

James Dimon is paid a thousand times as much a year as I make from my wages and also my widow's pension put together ( Read more... )

Here's Humboldt County's take on the issue of ch8ildcare funding.

The governor's latest proposal would throw 62,000 families out of state-subsidized preschools, among other atrocities.

Yesterday I wrote 2000 words and got a tremendous lot of story business accomplished. Today it's almost eleven, I've written 1700 words so far and I'm on a long break trying to get my unconscious brain to figure out what bridges what I just wrote with the next thing I know. After perilously close to 40 000 words the first on-screen utterly overt ( Read more... )

Mostly tangential to the real point of things, but yeah.

Pat Buchanan recently held up California as a bad example. He said because the state is "de-Christianized" (what does that ebven mean?) that there's a black-brown war going on, and California has "the worst bond rating" of all the states.

We actually have dropped to A-, guys. This is ( Read more... )

So people have been pointing out that Herman Cain's stupid taxation proposal sounds like the default tax structure in Sim City ( Read more... )

I just got a push poll, the kind where you know exactly who set it up after only a few questions.  It's all about the desalination plant ( Read more... )