The jobs swoon continues in June. I think that things are likely to get worse as we approach the election, and they won’t improve until business sees that Washington’s war on it is coming to an end.
Category Archives: Economics
Obama’s Green Energy Projects
Are any of them solvent? And what kind of idiot would think that a physicist would be a good judge of business plans?
Less than four months now until our opportunity to get these clowns out of our lives.
The Housing Crisis
As we all know, because Barack Obama and others tell us every day, it was Bush’s fault. Except when it wasn’t:
The report concluded that Countrywide executives used a special VIP loan program to try to stop legislation that would have restrained the company’s business with Fannie Mae. Countrywide had an exclusive agreement to sell billions of dollars in mortgages to Fannie Mae at a discounted rate, according to the report issued by committee chairman Darrell Issa, a California Republican.
“This report sheds new light on Countrywide’s relationship with Fannie Mae and how Countrywide used its VIP program to cement its ties to its taxpayer backed business partner,” Issa said in a statement. “Other than Countrywide, no other entity’s employees received more VIP loans than Fannie Mae.”
Well, if you don’t consider Chris Dodd’s. What political party were Jim Johnson and Franklin Raines, again?
James Lovelock
Let’s Have A New Space Race!
Anyone else notice what’s missing in this NYT op-ed by Doug McKinnon?
Private Profit
Public risk. Thoughts on Barack Obama’s venture socialism.
Repealing ObamaCare
The road map, from Keith Hennessey.
Dear Person Seeking A Job
Here’s why I can’t hire you.
A Response To Paul Bain
Your first paragraph amounts to an argument (or reduces to an argument) that “Everyone is doing it”. So, it is OK to use the N-Word because all your friends in the KKK use it? Is it OK to use ANY insulting degrading term “because all your friends” use it? Really?
Ignorance of where a term came from, or what it’s propaganda purpose was and is, is not an excuse. It is even a worse excuse in what is supposed to be a peer reviewed or carefully objective broad science context. Is it acceptable to just plead ignorance of, say, Einstein and Relativity in a paper on physics? Just say “Oops, didn’t know that, but I’m going to keep on ignoring it anyway.”? In ANY paper on the sociology of “Denier” one would reasonably expect the very first step to be looking at where the term originated, from whom, for what purpose and to what effect.
So here’s one free clue for you: I, like others, will now use the term “Denier” from time to time for ourselves. This is EXACTLY like blacks using the N-Word with each other to blunt the effect of it. Someone outside the group uses it, it is a red flag of bigotry. Similar to an Italian calling himself a “Wop” or any of a dozen other bad terms being used inside or outside the insulted group. So WHEN you use the term Denier, and you are not a Skeptic, you are waving a large “I Am A Bigot” flag. Got it?
Keep using it, and you are saying “I am HAPPY to be waving a large I Am A Bigot flag”…
Saying “All my friends us it” is saying “I’m Happy that all my friends are waving large I Am A Bigot flags”.
Just ask yourself “When is the N-Word” acceptable and you will have a decent guide to the proper usage and context of the term, and an accessible touchstone for the sociology of the term.
Indeed. As a reminder, here’s what I deny:
I deny that science is a compendium of knowledge to be ladled out to school children like government-approved pablum (and particularly malnutritious pablum), rather than a systematic method of attaining such knowledge.
I deny that skepticism about anthropogenic climate change is epistemologically equivalent to skepticism about evolution, and I resent the implications that if one is skeptical about the former, one must be similarly skeptical about the latter, and “anti-science.”
As someone who has done complex modeling and computer coding myself, I deny that we understand the complex and chaotic interactions of the atmosphere, oceans and solar and other inputs sufficiently to model them with any confidence into the future, and I deny that it is unreasonable and unscientific to think that those who believe they do have such understanding suffer from hubris. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, extraordinary policy prescriptions require extraordinary evidence.
I continue and am proud to be a “denier.”
[Update late morning]
You really should read the whole thing, if you haven’t. This is just a small excerpt from a massive take-down of the warm-monger crowd by an econometrist (and modeler).
One Giant Step
Frank White says that the Obama space policy is the second most important in history after JFK’s. I agree. Not sufficient reason to give him a second term, though.