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Another good week for the country.

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Comments

  • edited July 6
    "We got a decent monthly job report today.
    We created 147K jobs, the government lost more jobs, unemployment is still good at 4.1%."


    Non-farm payrolls increased by 147,000 in June which was higher than the estimate of 110,000.
    Government employment (state and local) led all categories with an increase of 73,000.
    Private payrolls had the smallest gain in eight months—74,000.
    Also, labor force participation fell to its lowest rate since December 2022—62.3%.

    People who have dropped out of the labor force are not represented in unemployment rate statistics.
  • edited July 15
    Shomer Shabbos! I don't roll on that day!!!! I told that stinking Kraut not to schedule...

    ...She kidnapped herself, man.
    It's all one big MAGA lie. And at least half the voters were stoopid enough to buy it. That's the awful shame underneath the dreadful news every single day.

    ...And this has nothing to do with Vietnam, Walter. Is this your homework, Larry?
  • At Crash!!! Thanks. The Dude abides!
  • edited July 18
    DBrooks NYT

    This loser country cannot respond as it should and once did

    " ... on Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, into space.

    Americans were shocked but responded with confidence. Within a year the United States had created NASA and A.R.P.A. (later DARPA), the research agency that among other things helped create the internet. In 1958, Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act, one of the most important education reforms of the 20th century, which improved training, especially in math, science and foreign languages. The National Science Foundation budget tripled. The Department of Defense vastly increased spending on research and development. Within a few years total research and development spending across many agencies zoomed up to nearly 12 percent of the entire federal budget. (It’s about 3 percent today.)

    America’s leaders understood that a superpower rivalry is as much an intellectual contest as a military and economic one. It’s who can out-innovate whom. So they fought the Soviet threat with education, with the goal of maximizing talent on our side.

    “One reason the U.S. economy had such a good Cold War was that the American university had an ever better one,” the historian Hal Brands writes in his book “The Twilight Struggle.” Federal support for academic research rose to $1.45 billion in 1970 from $254 million in 1958. Earlier in that century, American universities lagged behind their “best” European peers, Brands observes; by the end of the Cold War, they dominated the globe.

    Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
    Today we are in a second Cold War. For the first couple of decades it wasn’t clear whether China was a rival or a friend, but now it’s pretty clear that China is more a rival than a friend. As the scholar Robert D. Atkinson argued in The Times this year, for the Chinese regime, the desire to make money is secondary. “Its primary goal is to damage America’s economy and pave the way for China to become the world’s pre-eminent power,” he wrote.

    China is a country that, according a 2024 House committee inquiry, was directly subsidizing the manufacture and export of fentanyl materials, even though drug overdose is the leading cause of death among Americans 18 to 44.

    Since the beginning of the 21st century, China has moved — confidently — to seize the future, especially in the realm of innovation and ideas. China’s total research and development funding has grown 16-fold since 2000. Now China is surging ahead of the United States in a range of academic spheres. In 2003, Chinese scholars produced very few broadly cited research papers. Now they produce more “high impact” research papers than Americans do, and according to The Economist, they absolutely dominate research in the following fields: materials science, chemistry, engineering, computer science, the environment and ecology, agricultural science, physics and math.

    These achievements of course lead directly to China’s advantages across a range of high-tech industries. It’s not just high-tech manufacturing of things like electric vehicles, drones and solar panels. It’s high-tech everything. In the years between 2003 and 2007, according to a study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the United States led the way in 60 of 64 frontier technologies — stretching across sectors such as defense, space, energy, the environment, computing and biotech. By the period between 2019 and 2023, the Chinese led among 57 of those 64 key technologies, while the United States led in only seven.

    The Chinese gains in biotech are startling. In 2015 Chinese drugmakers accounted for just under 6 percent of the innovative drugs under development in the world. Ten years later, Chinese drugmakers are nearly at parity with American ones. ... "
  • @davidrmoran, thank you for sharing this piece from NYT. Today China is a frenemy to US in all aspect of high tech and drug manufacturing. They should not viewed as a low cost manufacturers of cheap goods back in the 80's. Take a look at the smartphone production as an example.
  • edited August 1
    “Another good week for the country.”

    Yeah - For sure ….. Off various news wires today

    - The Corporation for Public Broadcasting just announced it is shutting down.

    - U.S. just notched its worst 3 months for job growth since the pandemic.

    - Trump is firing the Director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (Expect better numbers next month.)

    - Trump is deploying 2 nuclear submarines to “appropriate” locations in response to something “provocative” a former Russian president said.

    - Housing starts (an economic bellweather) continue to fall.

    - Plans for a new $200 Million White House ”ballroom” have been unveiled.

    - Homelessness grows.

    - Chicago had the worst air quality of any city in the world yesterday.

    - U.S. stocks of every color are getting slammed today after several poor days.

    - Kimberly Clark is raising prices on 25% of its consumer products (including Charmin Tissue ) citing the impact of tariffs.

    - A B52 doing a ceremonial fly-over nearly took out a plane full of passengers on final approach last week. Somebody screwed up, and it wasn’t the civilian crew. Follows January’s Washington tragedy, blame for which the NTSB has clearly placed at the feet of the military command (after one of profound arrogance suggested it was related to gender, racial, ethnic diversity programs).

    - Gold’s up on all this “good” news. Keep a few ounces in your pocket. You may need it.


    Old poem:

    ”Well, that may be so
    But I don’t know
    It sounds so mighty queer.
    I really don’t like to doubt your word
    But your bullshit don’t go here.”
  • @hank- And, sir, in that very vein:

    A report from The Guardian:
    Donald Trump has said he’s ordered the firing of Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, hours after data showed US employment growth was weaker than expected for the last few months.

    McEntarfer was nominated by former president Joe Biden to serve in the role in 2023 and was confirmed by the US Senate the following year.

    In a Truth Social post, Trump suggested (with no evidence) that the employment figures were inaccurate and insisted the US economy was booming under his administration.

    “We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified,” Trump wrote.

    The bureau released revised job stats today which showed the US economy added only 73,000 jobs in July, far lower than expected, amid ongoing concerns with Trump’s escalating trade war.

    In the report, the BLS also slashed the number of jobs added in May, revising the figure down by 125,000, from 144,000 to only 19,000, and June, which was revised down by 133,000, from 147,000 to just 14,000 – a combined 258,000 fewer jobs than previously reported.
    OK folks- any government statistics are now only what Trump says they are. Good luck to everyone !

  • trump 2.0 long realized despite being a cult leader, america is far too big for any 1 man to supply the volume of lies craved by the gop.
    some effects of lies will be too late, but many will be ignored in the church of cognitive dissonance.
  • edited August 1
    Those are quite large revisions -- 144+147 to 19&14 ( 291-thousand to 33-thousand!)
    Do they just guess based on the last 3 months or something and then later collect the real numbers? We all thought this was going to happen, maybe it's the start.
  • edited August 1
    gman57 said:

    Those are quite large revisions -- 144+147 to 19&14 ( 291-thousand to 33-thousand!)
    Do they just guess based on the last 3 months or something and then later collect the real numbers?
    We all thought this was going to happen, maybe it's the start.

    Yes, these revisions are quite large!
    I don't have any specific facts regarding the latest revisions.
    Initial estimates of payroll employment provide a preliminary look at what occurred each month.
    As additional information becomes available, the estimates are revised.
    Subsequent payroll employment releases are therefore more accurate than the initial release.

    https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-2/revisions-to-jobs-numbers.htm
  • "Subsequent payroll employment releases are therefore more accurate than the initial release."

    Not if Trump says their not. You obviously don't understand the underlying principles of our new improved reporting systems.
  • edited August 1
    @Old_Joe,

    You have a valid point, sir! ;-)
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