Slashdot Mirror

Whether something is the fastest growing has a lot to do with where it started.

Another genius. Minnesota has traditionally had among the highest employment-population ratios in the country from before these latest statistics.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/20...

When you start with a small denominator

Minnesota has had among the highest employment-population ratios in the country since 1976. So no, they did not start with a "small denominator". You could have learned that easily enough.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/20...

Yeah! When you start out really close to zero it is easy to get a big percent growth.

Why, you stupid sonofabitch. Are you really so lazy that you couldn't spend ten seconds to learn that Minnesota has been among the states with the highest employment-population ratios for years before these latest statistics before making an ass of yourself? Don't you have any self-respect?

http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/20...

And by the way, the states with the lowest employment-population ratios are (take a guess) West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi and New Mexico.

The quickest way to increase diversity is to get rid of discrimination protection. It is very risky to hire someone from a protected group.

File this under sad-but-true. The very laws and rules that are intended to protect a group can end up causing them harm.

I used to manage a medium-sized company (50+ employees) which the Bureau of Labor Statistics had selected as part of its data sample (it's how they generate things like employment statistics - unemployment rate, new jobs added, etc.). I thought it was really weird that we didn't care about gender when hiring or working, and the only reason I had to actually count the number of female employees was to fill out the montly BLS form.

You'll also note from that cover letter that "The BLS will use the information you provide for statistical purposes only and will hold the information in confidence to the full extent permitted by law. In accordance with the Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act (Title 5 of Public Law 107-347), the information you provide to the BLS will not be disclosed in identifiable form without your informed consent." I suspect the EEOC has similar restrictions, and this is just some folks in Congress trying to pressure a company to release the info directly, after they first tried to get the info from the EEOC and were told point blank that that would be illegal.

We in the tech industry may be taking it for granted that, by and large, we can hopscotch from job to job however it suits us. In the broader U.S. economy, with official unemployment still above 5%, underemployment around 11%, certain communities (such as poor, minority urban neighborhoods) well above that, and wages more or less flat or declining for the past decade, I would argue we should count our blessings. That also does not consider the situation in, say, most of the rest of the world, where the statistics paint a worse picture.

In any event, the fluctuations in the unemployment rate and layoff figures month-to-month are pretty meaningless. You still like to have the granularity of month-to-month datapoints, but the broader trends are revealed only in longer timescales.

Having them working is efficient. Having them sitting in front of a burning house isn't.

Having them sit in front of their cute "fire house" all day is even more inefficient.

And that's what happens, when they are government employees — because each town has its own. The same would be happening, if each town ran its own restaurants — fortunately, the statism has not reached quite that far in this country.

They would do their best to save the burning house, but they would fail every time.

Now you are changing your argument — glad to see, we have the earlier one discarded.

Let's dispense with this new one. Service-providers, that oversell their capacity do not survive for very long either. Customers and insurers track them... Unless, of course, they are government-owned — the "trick" you described can be (and is) used by government-run fire-teams all the time. A mean annual wage of a New York City firefighter, for example, is over $73K, but they will refuse to even try to save your property, under the noble-sounding rule "We only save lives".

So you are saying that insurance is more expensive to cover for the fees in order for them to evaluate and approve private fire departments?

Somebody has to evaluate and approve all fire departments — whether they are monitored by the towns or insurance companies, it needs to be done on occasion. But insurance companies compete with each other and have "skin in the game" — their policies will be too expensive, if they aren't efficient about inspections. If, on the other hand, they are too loose in their standards, they'll lose money paying for houses destroyed by fires.

Town representatives do not have "skin in the game" and are swayed by personal sympathies if not outright bribery, which makes the system less efficient.

My point was just that the city shouldn't be providing a private corporation with free land and free water.

Maybe not. Something can be worked-out — after all, we do have private companies running cables (and even pipes) above and under the streets. Any resource available to government-owned firefighters ought to be — and is — available to privately-operated ones.

Well, if you go by the numbers, unions have certainly lost clout since around 1980, so I think the answer to your question is "yes." Here is the URL for the Bureau of Labor Statistics: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsluta...

1. There are already more STEM graduates than jobs.

No. STEM fields have an unemployment rate of about 3%, compared to about 5% overall.

3/4 of STEM workers leave the field due to poor pay and working conditions compared to other jobs.

Nonsense. About 75% of ALL college grads work outside their major. STEM majors are more likely to work in their major, and those that don't frequently work in other STEM fields, such as physics majors working as programmers.

When I managed a small business, I took the annual increase of the CPI for my area, and that would be the increase in payroll for the year (adjusted for growth in number of employees). Depending on if an employee was good or bad, they might get a bigger or smaller raise than the CPI. But the average per employee increase company-wide was always very close to CPI.

The reason is pretty simple. CPI actually tracks pretty closely with wages. If you really wanted, I suppose you could try to force your wages to the absolute minimum where you still get enough applicants to fill all your positions. But if your wages don't keep up with CPI, you're going to lose your good employees to better-paying companies, while a disproportionate share of your applicants will be bad employees who quit or were fired from their former job (because the better ones take one look at your wages and shop elsewhere). That management philosophy may work at low-end jobs where the quality of the employee doesn't really matter. But any employer whose company does anything more than menial labor knows that the employees are the company, and will try to get good employees.

You have a very distorted view of how to run a business if you think lowering costs (wages) is the only or even primary motivation of an employer. I suggest you try starting a company of your own, and learn from the school of hard knocks. You'll find out pretty quickly that low wages = low performing employees, and will leave you stuck with low-end clients and low-end jobs. The trick isn't just to flat-out minimize cost. It's to minimize costs in ways that have the least impact on productivity - i.e. make the company more efficient to operate, not just cheaper to operate.

Whatever. It's equally possible that those teachers know more than you do. I know for certain that I see people making asses of themselves by making assumptions.

You seem to ASSume that all women and all minorities are at least as qualified as any white or asian male. I have clearly stated that those women and minorities who possess superior qualifications, should be given the job that meets their qualifications. Those who don't qualify don't get a job.

There seems to be another ASSumption amond US-style liberals. If a white male walks into a company, and puts in an application, he's going to get the job. He's a white male, he gets the job, end of story.

And, naturally, if that were true, then there would be no unemployed white males, right?

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsrace...

The most relevant bit that I get from that PDF is, education, education, education. If you bother to get an education, you can probably find a job. If you don't bother to finish high school, times are going to be tough.

And, the demographic that is held down the most is - black teens. When you get out of the teen years, demographics don't play nearly as great a role in your job, as education does.

Imagine that. Education really does pay off!

Maybe they CAN, but on average, they make about one-tenth of that.

I agree with you, but not completely. For contrast, the Darpa grand challenge led to Google's self-driving car, which is poised to put 3 million truck drivers out of work.

You didn't reply to me, but I'll give it a shot...

Go back 115 years ago and look at how many jobs Horses had in the year 1900. They did everything from move people to haul stuff to ride into war. All those jobs sucked for horses.

Imagine the horses looked at cars and thought, "well, those cars might replace some of our jobs, but as we move into the city, there will be lots of people, so there will be plenty of new things for us to do.

As a human looking back past the year 2000, you know this is absurd, there are few jobs today that a horse can do that pays for its care and feed.

Horses didn't become unemployed because they became fat and lazy, they became unemployable. The horse population peaked around 100 years ago and it has been nothing but downhill since.

It won't happen next year, or even 5 years from now... but at some point... all those drivers, from taxis to trucks, will become unemployable through no fault of their own. They simply will not be able to compete with the cost of a robot.

3 million is a pretty small number, even just talking about jobs in the US.
In 2000 the US population was ~ 282.2 million(google search: united states population) and the workforce participation rate(percentage of 16+ with a job, not sure if it includes those on unemployment benefits, numbers from: http://data.bls.gov/pdq/Survey... ) in Jan was 67.3% giving 92.3 million not-working Americans.
In 2015 that goes to 320.9 million (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States) with a Jan participation rate of 62.9% giving 119.4 million not-working Americans, giving us 27.1 million more 'not working' Americans in 15 years, or about 1.8 million additional per year.
As such 3 million more 'unemployable' over a few years is not that big of a change.

While these numbers might seem alarming, you need only look further back to find that from ~1980 to ~2008 was historically high, and before the 60's it was actually below 60%.

Admittedly there is quite a difference between 'no longer needed'(truck drivers in 2025) and 'not available for employment'(1950's house-wife), as the latter increases the scarcity of labor and thus increases wages, while the other only increases the competition for the remaining available jobs, reducing the cost of labor.

It is funny how you guys still can't understand that the housing bubble was a direct result of liberal Democrat policy. The recession would have happened even if Gore won the 2000 and 2004 elections. But if that had been the case, you would find some way to blame it on those 'evil Republicans'.

As for 'the recovery', what recovery? Pumping billions into Wall Street to keep the economy limping isn't a recovery.

Thankfully, I can honestly state I didn't vote for McCain or Romney. I voted for Obama in 2008, and Green Party in 2012. But who I vote for doesn't blind me to reality.

You think that 60% of workers are getting paid minimum wage? You are delusional.
Read the BLS summaries: The median salary is over $17 an hour. More than 90% of employees make more than $11/hour - well above the $7.25 minimum wage.

Check injury rates, not just fatalities. According to http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/o..., the only work with higher national injury rates is nursing care.

Really? 1% of all Americans including children are truck drivers? There are about 150m Americans in the workforce at the moment so that would be 4.6% of all workers as truck drivers. The article is just another infotainment website and it sources a trucking enthusiast's website for this outrageous figure. Let's get some more reliable figures.

http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_tabl...

Right, so 4.4 million workers in the 'Transportation and Warehousing' sector. That sector includes taxi drivers, stevedores, pilots, travel agents, train drivers, conductors, couriers, the postal service... Does anybody believe there are 3 truckers for every other one of these jobs?

http://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag...

So the actual figure is 823,130 + 54,990 = 879 000 truck drivers.

It took longer to type this post than actually find that information.

Really? 1% of all Americans including children are truck drivers? There are about 150m Americans in the workforce at the moment so that would be 4.6% of all workers as truck drivers. The article is just another infotainment website and it sources a trucking enthusiast's website for this outrageous figure. Let's get some more reliable figures.

http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_tabl...

Right, so 4.4 million workers in the 'Transportation and Warehousing' sector. That sector includes taxi drivers, stevedores, pilots, travel agents, train drivers, conductors, couriers, the postal service... Does anybody believe there are 3 truckers for every other one of these jobs?

http://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag...

So the actual figure is 823,130 + 54,990 = 879 000 truck drivers.

It took longer to type this post than actually find that information.

People earning minimum wage tend to be under 25, single, and working in a service industry. These jobs are not careers, they are stepping stones. Sure, let's go ahead and kick that rung off the ladder, though. Makes people feel good.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage...

Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers: 2012

In 2012, 75.3 million workers in the United States age 16 and over were paid at hourly rates, representing 59.0 percent of all wage and salary workers. 1 Among those paid by the hour, 1.6 million earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 2.0 million had wages below the federal minimum.2 Together, these 3.6 million workers with wages at or below the federal minimum made up 4.7 percent of all hourly paid workers. Tables 1 through 10 present data on a wide array of demographic and socioeconomic characteristics for hourly paid workers earning at or below the federal minimum wage. The following are some highlights from the 2012 data.

Minimum wage workers tend to be young. Although workers under age 25 represented only about one-fifth of hourly paid workers, they made up about half of those paid the Federal minimum wage or less. Among employed teenagers paid by the hour, about 21 percent earned the minimum wage or less, compared with about 3 percent of workers age 25 and over. (See table 1 and table 7.)

By major occupational group, the highest proportion of hourly paid workers earning at or below the federal minimum wage was in service occupations, at about 12 percent. About three-fifths of workers earning the minimum wage or less in 2012 were employed in service occupations, mostly in food preparation and serving related jobs. (See table 4.)

The industry with the highest proportion of workers with hourly wages at or below the federal minimum wage was leisure and hospitality (about 19 percent). About half of all workers paid at or below the federal minimum wage were employed in this industry, the vast majority in restaurants and other food services. For many of these workers, tips and commissions supplement the hourly wages received. (See table 5.)

The proportion of hourly paid workers earning the prevailing federal minimum wage or less declined from 5.2 percent in 2011 to 4.7 percent in 2012. This remains well below the figure of 13.4 percent in 1979, when data were first collected on a regular basis. (See table 10.)

Considering that truck drivers and farmers have much more dangerous jobs then police, the wives should worry a lot. People aren't very good at judging risk though and think real life is like on TV or movies. I always hate on TV/Movies when the cops family member or friend talks about worrying if they're gonna come home safe.

In real life being a cop in America is a very safe job with very fat people.

http://time.com/3637967/police...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news...

They also get paid a lot more then almost all of the top 10 dangerous jobs in the USA.

http://www.bls.gov/ooh/protect...

It's a real thing, output per employee. I guess you could remain blissfully ignorant and reject new information, or you could learn stuff.

http://www.bls.gov/lpc/

It's much more satisfying to be outraged at anything that confirms your ignorant cynicism, ans easier too

Fair enough point, there are other dangerous jobs and I benefit from their work. This report says that the police officer is a little less than half as likely to die on the job as a truck driver (fishers, timber cutters, and airline pilots(!) are the most risky).

These statistics aren't normalized for patrolled neighborhoods though, I'm sure the cop in Oakland has a higher risk of fatality than the cop in Palo Alto. Fishermen also don't have to pick up the body of a 15 year old girl that committed suicide out of the bathtub. So yes, I'm grateful for the labor of those who work in risky jobs, and I'm grateful for the cops that help minimize random acts of violence.

police injury rates are _much_ higher than most work

Welp...sort of. The U.S. BLP recently published their 2013 census of fatal occupational injuries. The overall fatality rate for the workforce was 3.3 fatal injuries for every 100,000 full-time-equivalent workers per year. Management employees averaged 2.4; sales 1.6--no surprises there, really.

For employees in the "protective service occupations" - police, firefighters, correctional services, animal control, security guards, and so forth - the rate was 6.9 fatalities per 100,000 FTE. (I haven't been able to find data broken out by occupation within the category. If someone can find that, that would be great.) So that's what we expect--police, firefighters, and others do have a riskier job than the average, and riskier than the typical office worker. Somewhat surprisingly, the relative risk is only a factor of three or four different when comparing a police officer to, say, an IT manager.

But...there's the rest of the table. "Intallation, maintenance, and repair" occupations? 7.2 fatalities per 100,000. "Construction and extraction"? 12.2. "Transportation and material moving"? 14.9. "Farming, fishing, and forestry"? 23.9.

The real manly men, in real danger on the job, are apparently out there working with tools, building stuff, drilling for oil, driving big rigs, and cutting down trees.

And let's be honest--a lot of the injuries and fatalities sustained by police officers aren't directly attributable to violent suspects. A big chunk of them come from the fact that the typical frontline officer spends a lot of time moving around--in a patrol car, on a motorcycle, on foot, or on a bicycle. Special laws protecting police officers from insults don't actually reduce their likelihood of being in a vehicular accident, or getting clipped by a passing car during a traffic stop, or slipping on an icy sidewalk in the winter. Looking at the last ten years' police fatalities for the United States, the total number of officers killed in motor vehicle incidents (car and motorcycle crashes; hit by car) is 605. The total number of officers fatally shot, strangled, or stabbed is 553. (And I suspect that the proportion who get shot is even lower in Canada.)

And make no mistake, being a white male in this society is like playing the game of life on the easiest setting:

http://whatever.scalzi.com/201...

This misconception gets thrown around a lot. "Life is easier when you're a man" ... depends on what you mean by "easier". Life is certainly more privileged if you're a woman... like, for example:

Women live longer than men (82.2 vs 79.8) ,
work fewer hours than men (7.7 vs 8.4),
are safer in society than men are (23% of homicide victims, vs 77% for men),
have around 1/10th the incarceration rates as men do (126 vs 1352),
do less dangerous jobs (7% occupational fatalities vs 93% for men),
Receive more from a broken relationship than men (Number so low for men that it is not even significant),
are more qualified than men,
and are healthier.

So, other than living shorter, unhealthier lives, facing more violence, possessing less education while working more hours at 13 times the risk of death, *and* financially hurting more than women after a divorce, men are more privileged than women? Western women are objectively the most well-off demographic in human history. Subjectively, well, that's another story - opinions in the stead of facts don't mean anything anyway and it's pointless to debate subjective statements.

Oh, and the rape-rate for college age women? Roughly 7 per 1000, not 1 in 5 or 1 in 4. So much for "rape-culture"...

PS - I feel like I should post this in response to all the "male-privilege" comments, although I'm sure you'll (sooner or later) once again post about how male-privilege blah blah blah.... so I'm pretty sure I'll get another opportunity to post this.

And if you go back to 1970, Love Story was #1 with $106 million gross, and it was certainly not an action flick. In today's dollars, that's 641 million.

There are about 60,000 eligible households in the sample for this survey...Every month, one-fourth of the households in the sample are changed, so that no household is interviewed for more than 4 consecutive months.

Approximately 115,610,216 households in the United States.

Despite the BLS claim that "The CPS sample is selected so as to be representative of the entire population of the United States," it is difficult to believe that 0.057% of all households in the United States being sampled monthly results in accurately representative unemployment figures.

Actually, they do, and it is the one you hear most often in the media. I'm not sure where this fiction came from that people off of unemployment aren't counted among the unemployed, but the only three criteria for being counted as unemployed are:

• That you do not have a job,
• That you have actively looked for work in the past four weeks, and
• That you are currently available for work.

I've noticed a disturbing trend lately, mostly from right-wing nutcases, to try to redefine "unemployment" to be something that it's not, in some way that is different from how it's been calculated for decades, to include people like retired people not seeking a job, students, new mothers who have voluntarily left the workforce, people who haven't sought a job in more than a month, etc.

Unfortunately for them (and you), unemployment has a specific economic definition and doesn't change based on what you think "feels right". The current unemployment rate is 5.5%. Arguing that it's something different is like arguing that the mass of an object is higher because your arms are tired and it feels heavier when you try to lift it.

stop playing star spangled banner and smell the real coffee. what worked 100 years ago is not applicable now. the workforce is too crowded, the unemployment is sky high and we are borderline on depression, again and again. is that a time you think of as a 'work surplus' era?

WTH are you talking about? Unemployment right now is 5.5, which is well within the range it sat at from 2002 to 2008 before the recession started. The recession ended back in June of 2009 (6 freaking years ago). Our GDP (how recessions are officially measured) has been in the same range it was from 2002-2007 since then.

Most of the rest of your comment doesn't feel right to me either. I see no reason why sociological forces that built the USA would have suddenly stopped working the way they always did before. Normally I wouldn't bring up my "feelings", but since you seem to put more stock in how the economy feels than how it is really provably doing, perhaps that's relevant too.

I call BS. The unemployment is nowhere near "sky high".
Get your facts straight


http://data.bls.gov/timeseries...
http://www.tradingeconomics.co...

Actually, according to the latest figures I can find:
http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/20...
  in 2009, women were on average paid 80% of men, across a broad segment of the work spectrum.

This data is from the US Dept of Labor. If you have a more recent or competing authoritative citation I'd love to hear it, but in so far as I'm aware we still have an issue.

Min

U.S. Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2014 http://www.bls.gov/oes/current...

That long term unemployment number is as a percentage of unemployed people, per the link you posted. The department of labor (the bureau of labor statistics) calculates unemployment with a national household survey:

http://www.bls.gov/bls/unemplo...

The world bank unemployment numbers (which are actually gathered by the international labor organization) are just a regurgitation of the BLS numbers above, which you'd know if you'd bothered at all to investigate the numbers you are quoting above.

See:

http://data.worldbank.org/indi...

(look at the metadata for the source)

http://www.ilo.org/dyn/lfsurve...

(each country has it's own source, methodology, etc).

Valid complaints would be that the numbers reported don't include the homeless (although those estimates are gathered elsewhere), you don't understand the report, or that it conflicts with your personal opinion.

Even so.

$20 in 1913 was worth almost $500 today. But the nominal gdp per capita in 1913 was about $400, while in 2013 it was over $50000. So: $20 / $400 gdp per capita in 1913 = 0.05 or 5% of yearly income. $400 / $50000 = 0.008, or 0.8% of yearly income. Thus, purchasing power has increased since 1913. The equivalent of $20 today will buy you much more than you could get in 1913. That includes electronics that didn't exist in 1913: radios, wind-up LED lights, cell phones, etc.

Regarding your example of a good suit costing "in the thousands": 5% of $50000 is $2500. So your purchasing power has not decreased: you can spend the same percentage of yearly income on a suit, and get a very high quality one today, as you did in 1913. Also, there are so many electronic products that cost $infinity in 1913, such as computers, cellphones, TVs, and many other things we take for granted today.

The myth of inflation being such a destructive force is thus revealed to be hyperbole.

Actually, a more complete look at unemployment statistics puts it over 12% when you count for all the people that want to work, but have given up in frustration:

http://www.bls.gov/news.releas...

How can Arkansas hold its head up high when all the popular states have bucket loads of unemployed programmers and they only have unemployed mechanics?

1. Arkansas has more programmers per capita than New York or California.
2. Programmers have less than half the unemployment rate of other workers.

What never fails to concern people is that 100 years ago, 80% of humans worked in agriculture and earned $5k per year, and today we are replacing jobs that pay $100K per year at X rate with technology (or imports etc.)... Can we deduce from those two facts that the future is in jeopardy? "Poverty used to be in decline, but now wealth is in decline!" That's the argumentum in terrorem or "doom and gloom" fallacy.

The people quoted in TFA are having trouble speculating what the new jobs will be. Recall the hysteria in the 1970s and 80s about the number of USA jobs moving to Japan, or the 90s-2000s jobs moving to China. 80,000 jobs doing X were lost was a constant headline over 4-5 decades. Yet my state has

If the 80,000 jobs lost to Y during X period was an accurate predictor of concern we'd have reached 90% unemployment a decade ago. Technology both replaces and creates jobs, like App Developer or 3D computer animation artist, or smartphone assembler, that no one imagined. True, most of the new jobs being created today are being created in emerging markets, but as China develops more cell phone assembly jobs, USA sells China more Buicks.

If someone with a time machine had gone back to meet me 30 years ago and shown me film of me using a cell phone to browse the internet and speak to my kid in Europe, and told me the technology cost me $30K per year, I'd have believed that. And today that "imagined value" means I'm living like a person making $29k more than I actually am.

The BLS has not been the greatest predictor of which jobs will be in demand, but has predicted employment markets in aggregate pretty well. "The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) predicted a 15% increase in the employment for all animal care and service workers between 2012 and 2022; however, employment of zookeepers was predicted to grow more slowly than other positions (www.bls.gov)." http://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest...

Federal government's Bureau of Labor Statistics maintains really good numbers on relative number of deaths in various occupations. You can find the latest numbers here: http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshcfoi...

The FBI also releases a detailed report of pigs killed every year. You can find it listed as "Law Enforcment Officers Killed and Assaulted" as part of the annual Uniform Crime Reports program. It's on the FBI website.

And the malice comes from experience.

>$5-$6 for a movie rental way too high a price to be asking. It should be much close to $2 for a movie rental, or 25 to 50 cents for a tv show.

I actually agree with you (but actually think it should be even less than that per TV show -- literally nickeling and diming.. for a VERY few shows I'd pay more)..

But $5-6 isn't really all that much, comparatively. Using the inflation calculator at http://data.bls.gov/ $4 in 1998 is $5.81 in 2014. Originally Netflix (DVDs, of course) was $16/month, for 4 movies/month.. (not unlimited, and it didn't roll over.) I originally used Netflix since they were way cheaper (and more convenient) for DVDs after I got a DVD player.

The original Walkman cost $150 in 1979. Toss that into a handy inflation calculator and you get $487.92 in 2014 dollars. So this high-end audiophile device is priced about 2.5x what the first mass-market portable music player. Not really outlandish if you think of it that way. Even less so if you factor in that it has 128GB of built-in storage - other companies charge $300 for that much flash alone.

True, inflation has happened since 1977 when Hustle , the first implementation of Snake that I'm aware of, was released, and $.25 per play has become $1 per play (source). But Hustle at least offered more than 1 target per credit.

1. Hedge funds/billionaires being able to borrow at the Fed rate and at much higher margins than us peons (95% vs 50% for the rest of us) pumped the money into the stock markets.

Which I'm not sad about, since my savings is mainly in U.S. equities.

2. All the money floating around was used by corporations to do stock buybacks - not because their businesses were worth investing in (contrary to the myth taught in Finance classes and spewed by corporate PR departments) but because it allowed the CEOs and billionaires to get even richer.

And anyone else who owns stock in those companies. Like me. And I'm not even a millionaire.

3. 1 & 2 were all done at our expense because it weakened the dollar - making consumer goods more expensive; while our wages haven't gone up.

The dollar isn't especially weak. Here is a graph of its value vs. a basket of trade-weighted currencies. You'll notice it actually got significantly stronger during the recession. Here is a graph of CPI. Post-recession is has increased at about the same rate as pre-recession. I can't speak for everyone else, but my wages have gone up.

In the meantime, we are working longer and longer hours because in order to keep profits up, companies have been laying people off and making their current workforce work harder and longer.

Not working longer hours here. Here is a graph of average hours worked per week for employed persons. Seems like the current level is roughly the same as the level prior to the recession.

A plan that was supposed to help us out and get employment back to 2007 levels has horribly failed.

In 2007 U-3 unemployment ranged from 4.4% (March) to 5.0% (December). Current unemployment (November 2014) is 5.8%. The rate of decrease since peak unemployment (10.0% in October 2009) has been fairly linear at about 0.069% per month. At that rate we should once again be at "2007 levels" (i.e. 5.0%) in October 2015.

Yeah, here are the BLS statistics for median software developer: $93,000 per year.
For web developer it's worse, $62,000 per year.

Compare that one to this data, which puts software engineer at $130,000 median.

If you've been a programmer for a while, you should be making a lot more than that. Every recruiter that contacts me, I tell them first thing (after hello) that I'm not interested in anything under $170k. A lot of them go away immediately, but that's ok, I'm not interested in them.

Yeah, here are the BLS statistics for median software developer: $93,000 per year.
For web developer it's worse, $62,000 per year.

Compare that one to this data, which puts software engineer at $130,000 median.

If you've been a programmer for a while, you should be making a lot more than that. Every recruiter that contacts me, I tell them first thing (after hello) that I'm not interested in anything under $170k. A lot of them go away immediately, but that's ok, I'm not interested in them.

Agree with everything you said except your unemployment statistic (assuming we're talking USA here). November 2004 it was 5.5%. November 2014 it was 5.8%

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries...

In America we hardly have unions any more...

I didn't realize that 11.3% of the US workforce hardly exists.

In 2013, the union membership rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were
members of unions--was 11.3 percent ... The number of wage and salary workers belonging to
unions, at 14.5 million, was little different from 2012. -- UNION MEMBERS -- 2013

I put this together from several sources. But some good general articles

http://www.clevelandfed.org/re...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.bls.gov/cex/2010/st...
http://visualeconomics.creditl...

You can Google and find a ton on this.

Argh, didn't proofread my edits and two links broke the gender gap paragraph. Forgot that greater than and less then signs get treated as html blocks and get eaten.

From various reports the first one in a tab I closed, the second one like this we get stats. Poor mothers, UNDER $25K, usually stay at home. About 45% work. Once the individuals in the family make between $30K to $60K each it is common for both to work, with 77% of mothers in the workforce. But once they enter the "highly paid" range of over $90K of husband's salary the mothers start to tend to stay home, and once the husbands hit $150K it drops back to 43% of the women working. A large part of the gender gap in tech jobs comes from worker choice, not employer bias.

The unemployment rate is not a good indicator that our economy is turning around. People that are not working but have given up looking for work are not counted in the unemployment rate. The labor participation rate is a better indicator of our economy as it is a measure of how many people are working which has been in decline since 2009. Labor Force Participation Rate

The employment-population ratio (the only employment number that matters) continues to be 59 percent, as opposed to around 63 percent in 2007. Data is available here: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries...

Great numbers. Not a single source on any of them. If your source is your ass then please state so.

Unemployment rates:
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries...

Deficit numbers:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/... (First Spreadsheet)

95% of recovery goes to top 1%:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/mon...

Death toll in Afghanistan:
http://www.justforeignpolicy.o...

Who knew my ass was sited all over the Internet!

You know, a good bus driver kind of _is_ a hero. They take on a huge responsibility for crappy pay. Unfortunately, many of them are rather bad at it, but it's pretty understandable that anybody with any sense would choose another line of work.