lethal wrote:

swishnicholson wrote:If I recall correctly, the discussion on Apple and similar manufacturing focused more on the supply chains referenced above than on the availability of skilled workers.So many of the parts used for electronics are also produced in Asia that it currently makes more sense to assemble there where resupplying components is faster and cheaper. Plus the Asian market itself is so large and it can be more easily served by (sort of) domestically produced goods, while items brought in from the US are subject to the currency valuations that increase the price of goods (I'm not going to pretend to fuly understand this).


The availability of cheap, skilled, replaceable labor is also a factor, but only one of many.One wonders how much the labor market, though, is a chicken and egg thing, where if domestic manufacturing engineers were seen as in demand whether more would then enter the field.

2 things I recall from the article is the story of how, just 2 weeks before the release date of the 1st iPhone, Steve Jobs wanted to change the screen to a glass screen instead of plastic. The Chinese factory was able to rouse 200K workers from their dorms and get them working at midnight. It was also able to hire an additional 200K workers almost overnight. Can you imagine any production plant in America being able to hire that many people almost instantly to work long hours and live in dorms?

The article also noted that the lack of engineers was of some sort of engineer who didn't quite need an undergraduate degree and then went on to say that the decline of trade schools and skills training in high schools was the reason for the shortage of those kinds of engineers. I don't know if the "engineer" they are describing in the article that China has an abundance of and the US lacks is what we traditionally think of as an "engineer."

trade school and 'undergraduate(re: associates)', which i am, is definitely on the decline. you graduate from those schools with an xxx engineering technology degree. which leads to machining/designing/fabrication/assembly. i'm a mechanical designer by trade but the end result is just another form of engineering. 400k people is absolutely insane though. that just blows my mind.

Those kind of engineers would do all of the machine design from the transition from plastic to glass cutting to the fabrication fo the equipment to the assembly of the equipment. its all skilled labor.

that alien has well-defined pectoral muscles. good on him for hitting the gym.

jerseyhoya wrote:

thephan wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:ppppolls PublicPolicyPolling
Our Nevada poll: Romney 50, Gingrich 25, Paul 15, Santorum 8

Romp

Nevada has a huge Mormon population.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LDS_Percentage_of_Population_2000.PNG

7% of Nevadans are LDS

It's sizable compared to most places and will help Romney in a low turnout caucus, but he's winning other folks as well

I agree, but low turn out is expected for whatever reason, so 7%, although not guaranteed to come out and vote, could be very significant. Say 40% of the population come to the polls and 71.4 (5% of the population) of the potential Mormons vote Mitt as a religious calling as some suggest, then 12.5% of the voters are going to Mitt. That is a healthy head start.

If it finishes Newt and Rick, so be it, but I would say that it is hardly trustworthy data.

Ohhh, Noot. WTF?
The theme/concept, combined with an ominous version of "Pop Goes The Weasel"... WTF

Stop Romney's Pious Baloney wrote:(paraphrased)
As Guv, Mitt raised fees on "gun owners and people who are blind".

Blind hunters suffered the most.

Implied Unemployment Rate Rises To 11.5% - This should be the GOP spin

jerseyhoya wrote:Implied Unemployment Rate Rises To 11.5% - This should be the GOP spin

This strikes me as the VORP of political statistics - it may be a more accurate measure of the real jobless rate, but it's too obscure for easy consumption, and, thanks to its name, too easily lampooned.

Dems could talk about the Insinuated Tax Rate for Millionaires....

employment stats have all the sturdy reliability of your aunt Agnes' spongecake

the grade-school-level "correction" posited by the author of the linked article ("tyler durden", ffs) may as well have produced a figure of 13%, or 6%

If you would prefer we could use the labor force participation rate from the start of Obama's term, which would put the U3 unemployment rate at 11.0%. Hell even at the Jan 2011 rate it'd be 8.9% instead of 8.3%. The point is the fall in the unemployment rate has been as attributable to a shrinking labor force (discouraged workers) as people actually getting jobs.

Russia and China veto UN Resolution condemning Syria. Western diplomats at the UN seem pretty pissed.

jerseyhoya wrote: The point is the fall in the unemployment rate has been as attributable to a shrinking labor force (discouraged workers) as people actually getting jobs.

My point was practically any point made with reference to employment figures is more of an assertion than a point, if a point is equated with a fact. And assertions are like opinions, which are like....

Frankly if I'm Team Barry I try not to make too much of the "happy" figures, and in fact might say something very explicit along the lines of your assertion.

I'm not sure what you meant by "use the Jan 2011 RATE", jerz. Here's the thing, do more people have jobs this year than last year? If the answer's yes, that's going to resonate a lot more with voters than citing 7 different numbers. I don't really care which number is uses, U1,2,3 as long as it's used all the time.

I also sort of agree with DocSmooth that, assuming the number doesn't drop to something absurd like 4.2%, Obama shouldn't be touting it too much either.

The neat thing about yesterday's job report is that the sorts of jobs created in January aren't the low-wage, no-benefit shit positions that Rick Perry hoped nobody would notice comprised pretty much all the employments gains in Texas, but actual work that supports families and adds to the tax base.

Naturally Republicans are going to cherry-pick whatever figures make the president look worst. But the one I think is most illuminating as a broad measure of pain in the labor market is U-6: Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force. That figure is now 15.1 percent; as of late 2009, it was 17.5 percent.

What about UB40? There's a rat in mi kitchen?


We need more danceable protest music.

and yes I'm aware that UB40 is (or at least was) the form you'd fill out to get unemployment benefits in Britain.

jeff2sf wrote:I'm not sure what you meant by "use the Jan 2011 RATE", jerz. Here's the thing, do more people have jobs this year than last year? If the answer's yes, that's going to resonate a lot more with voters than citing 7 different numbers. I don't really care which number is uses, U1,2,3 as long as it's used all the time.

I also sort of agree with DocSmooth that, assuming the number doesn't drop to something absurd like 4.2%, Obama shouldn't be touting it too much either.

dajafi wrote:The neat thing about yesterday's job report is that the sorts of jobs created in January aren't the low-wage, no-benefit shit positions that Rick Perry hoped nobody would notice comprised pretty much all the employments gains in Texas, but actual work that supports families and adds to the tax base.

Naturally Republicans are going to cherry-pick whatever figures make the president look worst. But the one I think is most illuminating as a broad measure of pain in the labor market is U-6: Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force. That figure is now 15.1 percent; as of late 2009, it was 17.5 percent.

These are both fair points, especially dajafi's. U6 is the most complete measure and it has shown significant improvement (though it's still pretty awful). I don't know enough about how the BLS classifies people to make anything other than blind assertions on this, but I wonder if the unprecedented departure of people from the labor force is even able to be picked up when they try and measure people marginally attached there.

To Mr. 2sf's point about being consistent in using the same measure, the problem is the U3 rate's weakness (that it's only calculated on people in the labor force) skews the measure unprecedentedly/dramatically due to the current labor force % of population compared to that of recent times.

Here's a BLS chart that makes the point I'm going for better than I can in words. The labor force is essentially the same size as it was in 2008, but employment is down ~4 million and the number of people out of the labor force is up ~8 million. When you look at past surges in unemployment, there was not a similar contraction/stagnation in the labor force. Employment has increased this year by ~2 million, but the number of adults outside the labor force has grown by a similar amount.

It'll be interesting to see what happens tonight in Nevada. Looks like Mitt might break 50% and it might be close between Paul and Newt for second.

jerseyhoya wrote:It'll be interesting to see what happens tonight in Nevada. Looks like Mitt might break 50% and it might be close between Paul and Newt for second.

He should. IIRC, Mitt and Paul were the only ones to spend money in Nevada.

jh, the other thing to keep in mind when it comes to the size of the labor force--and I'll admit up front that I'm not sure how to quantify it--is that we've now passed the point at which Baby Boomers are reaching retirement age in really large numbers.

One thing about the downturn and the zillions in value it obliterated was that it pushed back retirement for literally millions of Americans. (This actually caused a bit of professional angst for me: in 2006 I wrote a report I was really proud of, and which got a nice bit of favorable attention in NYC, positing that the pending retirement of tens of thousands of Boomers in jobs that required more than a high school degree but less than four years of college created an unprecedented opportunity to reconnect a large number of the ~200,000 New Yorkers between ages 16 and 24 who were out of school and not working. These were jobs in fields like nursing, construction, and transportation--all of which showed a larger-than-average number of older workers, had well defined career paths and strong union presence. Then the fucking recession hit, anybody who had a job held on for dear life--in fact the only age group that saw an uptick in labor force participation were the 55-and-overs--and the kids continued to be SOL.) With the market having come back almost all the way now, I think it's possible that more of those Boomers will head toward the exits... which is really good news for the poor jerks who've come out of college (or, worse, not finished college) in the last few years only to find the cruelest job market in many decades.

Also, I'll admit to some geeky delight that we're talking about labor market stuff on BSG. Waiting for the estimable gr to weigh in here too... the one BSGer whom I've actually sort of done work with in the "real world."

Phan In Phlorida wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:It'll be interesting to see what happens tonight in Nevada. Looks like Mitt might break 50% and it might be close between Paul and Newt for second.

He should. IIRC, Mitt and Paul were the only ones to spend money in Nevada.

Is spending and campaigning in a particular state really positively correlated with results in this day and age? That would really surprise me. Seems like with the media glut that we've got, not to mention the interwebs, folks would base their decision on something other than the see on their local news.

I think it's less about the news coverage and more about the advertising.

jerseyhoya wrote: The labor force is essentially the same size as it was in 2008, but employment is down ~4 million and the number of people out of the labor force is up ~8 million. When you look at past surges in unemployment, there was not a similar contraction/stagnation in the labor force. Employment has increased this year by ~2 million, but the number of adults outside the labor force has grown by a similar amount.

As I understand it, most labor force data is still a dog's breakfast of survey sampling - that is, it's not directly recorded counts of workers. I've seen accounts of increased use of "hard" sources like data from ADP & other payroll processors, but I don't believe that data is transformative.

It's like if you had to rely on Metsgees' accounts of NL East teams' performance over the course of a season, with no access to box scores; your window on reality would be all smudgy-like, and conducive to the concoction of all kinds of linebeardy rationalizations.