This is not news. There is a small but significant population in Africa that is immune to AIDS despite having HIV. They can pass along the infection to those who are not immune, but they themselves are completely unaffected. Last I heard, they're estimating this population in the most infected areas of Africa to hover around 0.5%.
We've known about these people since the 80s. This is not news. If someone figures out how to flip that gene in regular people so everyone's immune, then we're talking...give it/. real estate. Short of that...not interested.
Yea, it's not the bullet that kills you...it's the sudden displacement of brain matter to nonfunctional locations (such as all over the wall). What you are saying makes perfect sense.
Ok, I'll give you a concrete example then, and you can explain to me how I'm an idiot.
My wife and I decide to go into SF to see a movie at the Metreon Friday night. We can: (a) drive and park in the Mission Street Parking Garage for 3-4 hours ($8.00) or (b) each pay $3.55 for a BART ride each way (2*2*$3.55 = $14.20).
If we take the BART, we have to be sure we don't go see the late show because BART stops running around 1am. If we drive, the garage is open 24/7 so we can leave whenever we want. Assuming we stay less than 6 hours, it's cheaper than BART too.
You can travel anywhere, even on BART, 24x7.
You'd better let the people at BART know that--they seem to think that the latest BART runs is 1am on Friday and Saturday nights. (And I haven't checked recently, but last time I did, Sun-Thu nights it capped off at midnight.)
I did! I drove a bottom-scraper Hyundai and it was a total joke. I also drove the low-end Mazda (88 hp engine--this was a few years ago). And I inherited that Omni from my dad so I owned it for a good long while. Even after it lost its legs, that thing could run circles around these other two cars new. (It was a real pocket rocket.)
The Hyundai, I distinctly remember having to tromp the gas all the way to the floor to get a nice, smooth, reasonable takeoff. On the highway, after about 45 seconds of having my foot on the floor, we got up to about 93 mph. So I'm not exactly sure about your experiences...
Gee, what a surprise! You mean that people became more affluent in the San Francisco Bay area over the course of the digital age, right up through the.com boom? I am shocked. Anyway, what you're saying isn't generally false for the country-at-large (though your choice of dates and locality is far more favorable to your point than the average US numbers)...it's true, people nowadays have more luxury items, including cars, than in the 1950s. Standard of living has gone up if you consider everyone. We now have dishwashers and microwaves and color TVs, and yes, even the trend in cars has followed this same trajectory generally speaking...that is, unless you consider the bottom 15% of the socioeconomic scale with respect to cars since about 1990, where the motion is decidedly retrograde.
Now, if we get back into the conversation we were actually having, which is limited to a particular item (automobiles) over a particular limited time range (from about 1990 on, when airbags and alarms and computer chipped engines and all sorts of other stuff started getting built into every single car), you'll see what I'm saying is true.
The only point you made in this post that is, on its surface, reasonable and relevant is your reference to the used car market. But, if you read my response to a previous poster, you'll see that that doesn't really hold up to analysis either.
A similar retrograde motion happened with TVs when every TV was mandated to have a V-chip added, costs spiked slightly, and no one noticed except the most impoverished. This car trend, though, is like this upward swing in TV prices on steroids because it's been a sustained action over several years adding significant cost.
(Do click the link I included above to my other post, it addresses much.)
You're right to be suspicious of those numbers from westegg. I checked an authoritative source before I even posted (I should've included it, I guess I forgot the/. crowd is inherently skeptical:-) ): Consumer Price Index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (search for the "inflation calculator" link).
According to the BLS, $5800 [1989] is $8414.68 [2002] (when I priced Focuses at $11K). This year, the 2005 Foci (sorry, had to) go for a stone-stripped base price of $13,090, which is $8565.44 [1989]. That's a difference of $2765.44 [1989] or $4226.22 [2004].
So the Focus is about $4200 more (today's dollars) than the equivalent car in 1989. I know for a fact that this isn't far off the mark, because if you look at home much it costs per car to computer chip the engine, meet more stringent bumper protection guidelines, add airbags, and do other things more or less mandated now by law or practically mandated by insurance companies (costs more in premiums to not have the feature than pay for it up front), it adds up to about $3800 for parts and labor. That leaves about $400 in profit for the car companies (which is a much higher margin than they make on the rest of the car because it doesn't account for R&D for incorporating these new features into their products and factory upgrades, etc).
The upshot is, what I'm saying is true. All this stuff costs money, and all this stuff limits low-income families from owning cars. It's true that the used car market is still there, but airbags and other mandated features don't make these cars last any longer or continue at any higher quality. (That's not to say they're not higher quality, just that they would have been higher quality anyway, and the used cars would have been that much cheaper.) But the used car market is a fickle market to try and gauge to understand the effects on low-income families--this is because used cars are not under warranty, and therefore they can't be counted as reliable transportation...necessary to, say, keep from losing a job.
Besides, if you look at the actual numbers, you'll find that in actuality, used cars aren't drastically cheaper than new cars on a consistent basis. "Consistent" is the watchword in that last sentence--we all know someone or other who's gotten a million miles out of a car with all original parts and only standard maintenance, but that's not the usual experience. If you amortize all of the cost of up-trended maintenance costs and sudden, large purchases (like when a tranny gets smoked--and these are the hardest on low-income families because they can't make a sudden investment in anything, regardless of what the upside is), you'll see that new, warrantied cars are indeed more expensive, but not *nearly* as much as you probably thought. (Considering a brand new $25k 2005 model against a 2002 model and a 1997 model, both of which were equivalently priced when new, you'll find the difference in total cost of ownership about $45/month and $60/month respectively if the "average" amount of stuff goes wrong with the used, non-warrantied cars. And if you think the extended warranty is a good deal...well, let's just say I have a bridge you might be interested in. So you can have a brand new 2005 Chrysler minivan for $360/month, or a used 8-year old for about $300/month--and this monthly fee will be unpredictably collected at that.)
Also, you'll see that many of the benefits of all this new-fangled technology we're paying for actually makes used cars more expensive to maintain in the long run. Used to be you could go to the auto parts store and throw a new distributor on your car. Used to be you could change your own engine coolant. Now with cars being closed systems, you have to pay a mechanic to do much of this long-term work, pumping up the cost of keeping these older cars.
No they won't. In 1989 my dad bought a Dodge Omni, stripped...the only option was a rear window defroster, it didn't have A/C, automatic tranny, power steering, brakes, doors, windows, nuttin'. He paid $5800.
Now look at the cheapest car money can buy, discounting the Hyundais and the Kias (we're going to keep the quality/power level approximately the same...that Omni was a car, not a lawn mower). The equivalent car now is probably the Ford Focus. Stripped, it's like $11k. Did inflation nearly halve the value of a dollar in the last 15 years? No, on the contrary, inflation has been rather low. What happened, then? Air bags and computer chips.
I'm not necessarily complaining here, though I do think that when you require all cars be made with airbags, that's not very compassionate to the lowest-earning 15% or so of society that now finds even the cheapest car to be way beyond their means. This limits their potential job opportunities to jobs that happen to be on public transportation routes, meaning that they must choose from a much more limited pool of possible employment situations than normal. Thus, the cycle perpetuates. (And besides, public tranny ain't cheap either--I live in the San Fran bay area, and I moved to a new apartment that has commuter access to SF. I was overjoyed at first...but it turns out, I never use it--it's way cheaper to drive my car and pay exhorbitant parking rates in the city. If that's true for me, and I'm fairly middle class, how do low-income families swing it?)
For most people, the cars we buy are way beyond transportation and we identify ourselves with them. We must have air or the leather seats or the sport suspension. For these people, a car is nothing short of independence, though, and we rob them of that independence when we raise the floor on cars.
Cars aren't the only place this happens either--another good example would be if the anti-cruelty people were successful in passing laws requiring that all chickens be free range, or all veggies be organice. Then there'd be a significant chunk of the population that would find they have to cut back on their grocery bills every month and buy less, or further compromise already poor eating habits. Are we willing to trade human lives for animal comfort? Certainly, there's a balance we have to strike here, but if everyone were vegan/vegetarian/organic-only/"humane"-only, food would cost a heck of a lot more.
I'm just shocked that anyone still thinks priests are super-human people that can force down those kinds of urges for a lifetime, given the recent scandals. It's just such a...I dunno...naive and quaint way of looking at the world.
Well, I guess I would agree that pot is a pretty good analogy for your case. However, I'd also point out that, if we're going with this analogy, it's not at all clear that our laws regarding marijuana are beneficial overall to society. I'm not a big legalize drugs type of guy, but when you consider the number of tax dollars we're spending on jailing people for relatively light pot offenses, it does seem wildly out of proportion. I've heard the gateway drug speech like a thousand times, but then again, I know a lot of kids in high school that played around with pot, and most of them didn't go on to crack or heroin or even cigarettes. Most of them simply stopped using pot once they left high school or college.
I'm having a tough time following you. I don't see how porn saps society of moral strength. You'll have to develop that into an actual argument for me to see the path from premises to conclusions you're drawing.
As far as rape being common--common compared to what? There's much higher rates of rape in other parts of the world that aren't as sexualized as the US. Most of the rape that goes on in the world actually has less to do with sex and more to do with exerting force or making a show of power...it is a function of extreme limits on societal freedoms, not oversexualization within the population. If you don't believe this, look at fundamentalist Islamic countries where rape of women is much more common...this is an expression of power over women, not an side effect of the oversexualization of them. Look at rates of rape in unstable situations such as Rwanda and other warring parts of Africa. Compare this to rates of rape in places like France and Amsterdam, which are even more overtly sexual than the US, and you'll begin to see my point. Rape is about an imbalance and expression of power over women, not sex. As a capper to this argument, I'll point out that it's not even to do with women, necessarily! Look at our own prison system here in the US, where heterosexual men rape other heterosexual men every day as expressions of power over them. It's just too clear-cut to ignore.
If you look at things like rape and sex from a rational standpoint, instead of idealogical one (whether informed by religion or politics), you begin to see that things generally get healthier as we afford the general population more freedoms, not less. Following the religious ideal to the extreme, one would think that no sexual displays would increase the "respect" men have for women. But we look at countries that require women to go around in burkas, covered head-to-toe, and we see the exact opposite. Meanwhile, France has women running around bare-breasted on network TV, viewed by all ages, and it's the exact opposite.
The real problem here, I think, is the unnatural subversion of a basic human urge (one that is shared by both men and women). I understand very well the reason why organized religion would like people to feel guilty about sexual urges. Sexual thoughts are things that no one can avoid by design, and if the church is selling a panacea to address guilt and it can simultaneously get the people to buy into a belief system that manufactures that guilt on an hourly basis, that's just good business.
The real question is, are women sex objects? Are men? The answer is, yes! Not always, but some of the time people are sex objects to other people, pure and simple, and there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, without that tendency, some other organism would have come along a long time ago and knocked us out of contention altogether. (Yes, that means I'm buying into evolution theory.)
...I've never heard that "the majority" or "nearly all of them" do...
Re-e-e-e-eally? The recent HBO documentary on this topic is probably the most popular and accessible evidence in recent memory...but if you don't have HBO all you really have to do is visit any university library and do a bit of reading up. Psychosexual studies on the practice of celibacy as well as a number of psychology and religion books address this. Also, new books that have come out in lieu of the Catholic priest scandals, while themselves are usually biased sources of information on this, typically cite several reliable and independent such studies.
It's true. Nearly all priests have used pornography during their priesthood, and the majority use it consistently. Actual numbers are hard to come by, but when anonymous independent polls have been conducted of celibate priests, nearly every one shows more than 50% are or have been involved in long-term affairs (more than 1 year). Some will find even more shocking that the priesthood tends to attract a slightly higher proportion of gay men than are present in the population. Since being gay and being religious causes a deep internal conflict, those gays who are devoted to religion oftentimes see the priesthood as a viable option in life since the alternative is either lonely or what they themselves see as deviant. There is some evidence that even suggests that gayness combined with the deep-seated stigma propagated by the Catholic church about all sex, particularly homosexual sex, coupled with the psychosexual stunting of those who enter seminary in the early stages of puberty can result in extreme, unhealthy mental pressures that result in the pedophilia scandals that have plagued the church for the past 50 years. Even more telling than the studies is how the church has handled these cases over the last several decades--a complete and total unwillingness to deal directly with them belies something a bit deeper in the shared psychology of church officials.
Obviously, this is a very sensitive topic that most of the public doesn't particularly want to know or think about, so it's not out there in our faces every day. But if you dig a little, it doesn't take much to start turning up evidence that, guess what, priests are actually people too.
Well, far as I understand, a cogent argument results in a conclusion that is based on a set of premises. I guess I was having a difficult time identifying your premises and the argument that connects them to your conclusion.
Then again, I'm not that smart. It could be your argument is relying a bit too heavily on the enthymematic and that's why I'm not getting it.
Well, in the US we typically label the left "liberal" and the right "conservative", and these labels have stuck with some basis in reality, but it's important to understand that no label can possibly characterize a thing so nuanced as a political worldview.
So where do these labels come from? The non-political definitions of the term liberal revolve around the idea of not being constrained by tradition, orthodoxy, etc, while conservative means favoring traditional views and generally being opposed to change. Note that these are not directly opposing viewpoints, in the sense that where liberal does not mean disfavoring all traditional views and always being for change, nor does conservative mean being constrained by tradition.
If we dogmatically insist that the term liberal is meant literally when applied in politics, that would mean a liberal's core belief system is informed only by change. In other words, if you're liberal and pro-choice, it's not because you believe pro-choice is the most ethical position, it's just that you understand it to be different from what has been done traditionally. To remain truly liberal in the literal sense, though, such a person would have to recognize that, at some point, they'd have to become pro-life because pro-choice has been around long enough to become traditional. (It's already been around since Roe v. Wade.)
(Incidentally, maybe this is why John Kerry is a flip-flopper. Maybe he doesn't understand that he's not to take the term liberal seriously, and it's actually ok to hold a view even after it's become accepted by a majority. Just kiddin'. Jeez, don't be so uptight.)
So clearly, there are some situations where reality flouts the label; there are cases where liberals want to uphold tradition and conservatives want to change something they see as not working. I'm always put off by discussions that focus more on semantics than substance, such as the argument over whether someone is "pro-choice" or "pro-abortion", or "anti-choice" or "pro-life". It's dishonest to try and abandon the context of these nuanced positions. The two sides ought to be called "pro-choice" and "anti-abortion", which is a fair and charitable assessment of where they each stand, I think. (Perhaps "pro-choice" is a bit more charitable...after all, pro-choice people don't support choice in all cases, only when it comes to the issue of abortion, so it is a bit more charitable than perhaps it should be to that side of the debate. Anyone got anything better?) It always kills me when we the people let the participants in the debate come up with these labels themselves...they always get the most extreme labeling installed that they can sneak past us because it's to their advantage to do so.
We as a society have chosen (in the face of loss of freedom) to ban murder.
Society does not ban murder "in the face of loss of freedom". We ban murder to guarantee greater freedom; the ban on murder costs relatively little freedom (the freedom to murder) in exchange for much greater freedom (the freedom to not be murdered). Your analogy of porn to murder is broken. In the case of murder, the murderer is depriving the victim of a basic and inalienable right to live, and the victim's freedom to live is in no way in conflict with some equally basic and inalienable right that the murderer is attempting to exercise.
In the case of pornography, both parties to the transaction are willing. Those who make porn are obviously willing to make it, and those who view it are obviously willing to view it. If the effects of this transaction do not promote behavior that derives anyone else of any freedoms in a direct and demonstrable way, then it's protected. The Founding Fathers did not believe it was government's place to "save one from oneself". It is the place of government to save one from the unethical and unjustifiable actions of others. This is the clear and overriding purpose of the Tenth Amendment.
I'm responding to your post in the hopes that I can help you to increase awareness about the very important issue of bigotry directed at atheists, as well as agnostics, which seems to have gone completely unmentioned in this discussion up until now.
Specifically, I'm interested in increasing my awareness of such bigotry, since I am agnostic, most of my friends are atheists, and none of us have ever been on the receiving end of any such bigotry to my knowledge.
On the prayer-in-school thing, the discussion is nonsensical. How can you stop someone from praying? Orwellian stopthink tactics? Allowing people* to do whatever they want is not the same thing as promoting it, even if there's more than one of those people, and they do stuff out loud. Should the school start devoting resources to supporting such gatherings such as class time or public tax money, that's promotion. But simply allowing a student to pray or express their own religious beliefs (provided it does not disrupt the main function of the school, which is to educate children, in any way) is not promotion.
* For the purposes of this discussion, the term people includes children.
I was about to come up with some clever play on words about how you were commenting on someone else's misunderstanding of irony without understanding it yourself. That is, until I read your post carefully and I realized: You're 100% right.
It is sensible and consistent to hate intolerance in all its forms. Being tolerant implies that one believes others should be tolerant as well. Therefore, others who are intolerant would not enjoy support from those who are both tolerant and rational.
So the question is, is the grandparent's author unaware of what irony is, or unaware of what tolerance is? He is perhaps confusing tolerance with acceptance. Tolerance means I'll tolerate you, but I don't have to like it; it just means I'll put up with it. One can be tolerant of gays without supporting their lifestyle, for instance. Acceptance of the gay lifestyle, on the other hand, means that you more than just tolerate it, you think it's an equally valid way of life. This is important because it allows one to see how someone could be against gay marriage and still be considered tolerant of gays, i.e., no one's saying people can't be gay, just that society will not accord those people certain privileges.
In the crunchy-granola, PC nineties I think that many people have perhaps made the mistake of equating tolerance and acceptance, and they're not the same thing.
There are religious and non-religious people who enjoy religion, too. My religion prof in college was atheist, but dedicated his life to studying religion and derived more from religion, in terms of how he lived his life and made decisions, than most religious people.
I haven't done the experiment, but I'd be willing to try this out--every time you see a sentence that contains the word religion, replace it with pornography and see if that statement could possibly be true. In discussions revolving around censoring either, I think you'll have a fairly high hit rate:
Society should do away with X, because it causes some people to behave in illegal and deviant ways.
Excessive amounts of X can harm the normal development of children.
People spend way too much money on X, money that could be used to better ends for society.
The relationship of the big 3 religions to sex is schizophrenic at best. That's why Muslim women who've been raped are shamed, disowned, or stoned to death; furthermore, this is seen as the valid application of law in some parts of the world. (Question: How many people have to believe in something for it to become a "real" part of that belief system? I don't understand how some Muslims can flatly say, "That's not real Islam," when so many Muslims clearly believe and practice such acts as though they are concordant with "real Islam".) It's also why the majority of Catholic "celibate" priests carry on affairs, and nearly all of them use pornography to varying extents. And it's why, in some cases, these priests turn into pedophiles...many of these pedophile priests entered the seminary around puberty, and the conflict between their bodies and their minds created an irreconcilable situation that ultimately expresses itself in the form of deviant behavior.
These religions depend on subverting humankind's most powerful urge to gain the moral high ground, pure and simple. Make people feel that sex is dirty, make them feel self-conscious about it, and they'll feel guilty that it's inexorably intertwined in their thoughts on a daily basis. Offer them the prospect of freeing them from that guilt through regular participation in the church, and you've got a successful business model that will keep them coming back.
...I have never, ever, tried to "talk sense" into anyone. I don't think anyone should.
I think your statement here is a bit too extreme. Why do the religious have the market cornered on broaching this conversation? In my view, anything should be up for debate at any time amongst the thinking masses. The trick is in how you do it, not whether you should. If the person you're talking with is receptive to the discussion, then it should proceed until it resolves itself of its own volition regardless of who brought it up and what their personal beliefs are. But anyone should be allowed to talk about anything as long as they're respectful of their counterpart in the discussion.
There are important practical reasons to discuss these things from early age onwards. In my experience, many religious people have not explored their beliefs in the context of reconciling those beliefs with reality. This is not to say that religion can not be reconciled with reality to a great degree, just that most of the people I've spoken with throughout my life have not made the attempt.
But this is very important when a significant number of people hold a worldview that is significantly informed by such a system of beliefs. Many of these religious people I've known draw conclusions from their basic set of religious beliefs that do not at all follow, on any variety of topics (evolution probably being the most prominent). It is important that people retain their ability to think critically alongside religious beliefs to ensure they don't begin using religion as a crutch, a stand-in for critical thought and reasoning.
Remember, Andrea Yates killed her children because she believed god told her it was the right thing to do. Many people scoff at this example initially until they consider my point from a philosophical perspective. If you believe in god, what if he did tell her to kill her children? Isn't it at least possible? Doesn't he work in mysterious ways, after all? And who are we, as a society, to question Yates' actions if she was working under a divine directive? Shouldn't we at least try to rule out this out as a possibility? How would we go about doing such a thing? If you are religious and you haven't thought about such knotty issues that come along with these religious beliefs, perhaps you should.
A physicist friend of mine recently said to me: It's very difficult to explain to someone why it's important to invest millions of dollars in keeping the Hubble telescope running when that person thinks there are physically incarnate beings flitting around called angels that influence their everyday lives in real, physical ways. [source 1] [source 2] He's right--a disconnect from reality can be very dangerous, even a very tiny disconnect, if it's believed by enough people.
One could argue therefore that we do persecute certain people who choose not to believe in the scientific process and its implications.
One could also argue that there's nothing wrong with that. Nature persecutes those who do not believe in the scientific process by not allowing them to develop things like better food, cleaner water, and myriad other things. Why shouldn't people do the same?
Huh. I've heard that you can catch a rainbow and put it in your pocket, and I also believe everything I hear. Now I just have to figure out how to do it.
I like how you said, "Here, I would argue..." (my emphasis). You would? Well, then, why don't you? I'm listenin'.
Congratulations on the new job. It's a shame that IT represents only a fraction of the workforce, and training for IT is more time consuming and expensive than the average joe can pick up and start life again from scratch. Besides, if everyone switched to IT, you could expect to see your luck dry up with the influx of new labor.
Nice try, but I'm still not buying it. I know people in several sectors that are experiencing a pick-up, blue collar and white collar. For instance, the trucking industry is picking up and everyone that's involved is getting back to work...dispatchers, drivers, dock workers, terminal managers, bindery clerks, truck mechanics, etc. I know a secretary that have been on unemployment that just found a job. I know a lawyer that just found a job after doing contract work for a couple of years. The jobless phase of the jobless recovery is over.
Everyone doesn't have to switch fields, nor would that be good for the economy. (That's not to say some people don't have to switch fields--if you were answering phones in a call center, you're now pretty much irrelevant. Some churn is good--we do need to make sure our resources are being directed in the most efficient means, and if India can provide more efficiency right now in call center processing, then that's just the "creative destruction" of capitalism...of course, whether they are more efficient at handling this is debatable, but you get the point. If we never lost certain job functions, we still have 1950s-style switchboard operators putting our calls through.)
It's a shame that you would let your personal luck allow you to make a sweeping statement that the economy across all sectors is on a rebound.
I think you see from the above passage it's not only my personal luck informing my statements. Actually, as I said originally, it's not luck, and it's not even the anecdotal evidence I'm presenting of all these people, who were in unsteady job positions or just straight-out unemployed, suddenly getting jobs. It's the experience of job searching that each of them has reported to me that is really behind my attitude--they're all saying that after 24-36 months of a whole lot of nothing, this last few months of job searching has been very active. (Just for the record, this is geographically restricted to the LA, SD, SF, and Chicago job markets.) For three years or so I've been doing software contracting and those contracts have been hard to come by until about a year ago...get a call for a job, and I'd take it b/c who knows how long until the next one. This time, totally different experience...lots of companies hiring. This has nothing to do with "luck" and a lot more to do with...well, companies hiring, I guess.
Your earlier statement that management is the first to go in a bad economy is quite false. Labor is almost always the first to go.
I never said management was the first to go in a bad economy. I said it was the last to feel a recovery from a bad economy. You're statement is correct--labor is the first to go. What I said was, labor is also the first to come back, before management. (I always try to understand an argument before I rebut it...that's just what I do.)
Besides, if and when the economy rebounds, the conservatives won't let Kerry accept credit. It would be like them admitting their own guilt for doing anything for over 3 years, something which has not happened once in the last 4 years.
Well, strictly speaking, neither Democrats nor Republicans can do much of anything to change the economy short-term, in the space of a few years here and there. We've had a bad go of it the last couple of years because of the dot com bust--not because of Clinton, or Bush, or anything to do with what anyone's political ideology wants them to believe. Basic macroecon...the president can have small, barely
Yea, I see what you mean. How about the level is attached to the month and year it was assigned? So you have a level 5 May 2004, which is slower than a level 5 October 2004.
I think the whole levels thing is probably a non-starter idea. If you double processor speed but halve the amount of RAM, have you changed the level of a PC? You could obviously do quite a bit of varying these independent aspects of a system without changing its level, but clearly they'd be different PCs used for different purposes. This levels thing just isn't going to work.
You know, I keep hearing about how bad the economy is, and I was starting to believe it myself. But I'm in software development, the first field to be hit by the downturn and one of the first fields to start recovering (after financial institutions--they always feel it first). Well for the last year or so, I've had no trouble finding work, and things have really picked up lately. I'm in Silicon Valley and during my latest job search, I put my resume up on DICE and was getting 3-5 calls per day.
I just signed to take a job yesterday. My brother graduated six months ago with an MBA, and management is traditionally the last sector to recover, and he just locked up a job as well. (Yes, management is the last to recover--when companies are unsure about money, they hire the people on the front lines and try to make that work before they start bringing in middle managers to manage the projects they've created.)
I was starting to believe the Kerry hype over the last year or so, but this latest experience with this job search I just went through, turning down offers and having multiple offers on the table at one time, all while in the industry supposedly hardest hit by all of this outsourcing...I'm thinking Bush is right after all. The economy is on an upswing and it's only a matter of months before everyone feels it.
It's too bad that if Kerry gets elected, everyone's going to think that he somehow magically did something to recover the economy in his first couple of months, because that's how long it'll take before things are back in full swing. As if that was even possible. It's like when 9/11 happened, the Dems are saying, Hey, that happened on Bush's watch. Not fair, people. You don't have a weak-kneed (when it comes to foreign policy) Democrat in office for 8 years who doesn't take any kind of stance against terrorism, and then we get hit 8 months after Bush is in office, and "it happened on his watch."
Anyway, to the main point. This post above, however close to home these job losses have struck, it's anecdotal. (Sorry, but it's true.) My bro and I getting jobs is also anecdotal, but our experience during the job search is not. One does not receive several calls a day and competing offers in the hardest-hit industry in a bad economy. It just doesn't happen--I should know, I lived through it the previous three years or so.
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This is not news. There is a small but significant population in Africa that is immune to AIDS despite having HIV. They can pass along the infection to those who are not immune, but they themselves are completely unaffected. Last I heard, they're estimating this population in the most infected areas of Africa to hover around 0.5%.
We've known about these people since the 80s. This is not news. If someone figures out how to flip that gene in regular people so everyone's immune, then we're talking...give it /. real estate. Short of that...not interested.
Yea, it's not the bullet that kills you...it's the sudden displacement of brain matter to nonfunctional locations (such as all over the wall). What you are saying makes perfect sense.
Ok, I'll give you a concrete example then, and you can explain to me how I'm an idiot.
My wife and I decide to go into SF to see a movie at the Metreon Friday night. We can: (a) drive and park in the Mission Street Parking Garage for 3-4 hours ($8.00) or (b) each pay $3.55 for a BART ride each way (2*2*$3.55 = $14.20).
If we take the BART, we have to be sure we don't go see the late show because BART stops running around 1am. If we drive, the garage is open 24/7 so we can leave whenever we want. Assuming we stay less than 6 hours, it's cheaper than BART too.
You'd better let the people at BART know that--they seem to think that the latest BART runs is 1am on Friday and Saturday nights. (And I haven't checked recently, but last time I did, Sun-Thu nights it capped off at midnight.)I did! I drove a bottom-scraper Hyundai and it was a total joke. I also drove the low-end Mazda (88 hp engine--this was a few years ago). And I inherited that Omni from my dad so I owned it for a good long while. Even after it lost its legs, that thing could run circles around these other two cars new. (It was a real pocket rocket.)
The Hyundai, I distinctly remember having to tromp the gas all the way to the floor to get a nice, smooth, reasonable takeoff. On the highway, after about 45 seconds of having my foot on the floor, we got up to about 93 mph. So I'm not exactly sure about your experiences...
Gee, what a surprise! You mean that people became more affluent in the San Francisco Bay area over the course of the digital age, right up through the .com boom? I am shocked. Anyway, what you're saying isn't generally false for the country-at-large (though your choice of dates and locality is far more favorable to your point than the average US numbers)...it's true, people nowadays have more luxury items, including cars, than in the 1950s. Standard of living has gone up if you consider everyone. We now have dishwashers and microwaves and color TVs, and yes, even the trend in cars has followed this same trajectory generally speaking...that is, unless you consider the bottom 15% of the socioeconomic scale with respect to cars since about 1990, where the motion is decidedly retrograde.
Now, if we get back into the conversation we were actually having, which is limited to a particular item (automobiles) over a particular limited time range (from about 1990 on, when airbags and alarms and computer chipped engines and all sorts of other stuff started getting built into every single car), you'll see what I'm saying is true.
The only point you made in this post that is, on its surface, reasonable and relevant is your reference to the used car market. But, if you read my response to a previous poster, you'll see that that doesn't really hold up to analysis either.
A similar retrograde motion happened with TVs when every TV was mandated to have a V-chip added, costs spiked slightly, and no one noticed except the most impoverished. This car trend, though, is like this upward swing in TV prices on steroids because it's been a sustained action over several years adding significant cost.
(Do click the link I included above to my other post, it addresses much.)
OH NO YOU DI'INT! <rolls up sleeves> :-)
You're right to be suspicious of those numbers from westegg. I checked an authoritative source before I even posted (I should've included it, I guess I forgot the /. crowd is inherently skeptical :-) ): Consumer Price Index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (search for the "inflation calculator" link).
According to the BLS, $5800 [1989] is $8414.68 [2002] (when I priced Focuses at $11K). This year, the 2005 Foci (sorry, had to) go for a stone-stripped base price of $13,090, which is $8565.44 [1989]. That's a difference of $2765.44 [1989] or $4226.22 [2004].
So the Focus is about $4200 more (today's dollars) than the equivalent car in 1989. I know for a fact that this isn't far off the mark, because if you look at home much it costs per car to computer chip the engine, meet more stringent bumper protection guidelines, add airbags, and do other things more or less mandated now by law or practically mandated by insurance companies (costs more in premiums to not have the feature than pay for it up front), it adds up to about $3800 for parts and labor. That leaves about $400 in profit for the car companies (which is a much higher margin than they make on the rest of the car because it doesn't account for R&D for incorporating these new features into their products and factory upgrades, etc).
The upshot is, what I'm saying is true. All this stuff costs money, and all this stuff limits low-income families from owning cars. It's true that the used car market is still there, but airbags and other mandated features don't make these cars last any longer or continue at any higher quality. (That's not to say they're not higher quality, just that they would have been higher quality anyway, and the used cars would have been that much cheaper.) But the used car market is a fickle market to try and gauge to understand the effects on low-income families--this is because used cars are not under warranty, and therefore they can't be counted as reliable transportation...necessary to, say, keep from losing a job.
Besides, if you look at the actual numbers, you'll find that in actuality, used cars aren't drastically cheaper than new cars on a consistent basis. "Consistent" is the watchword in that last sentence--we all know someone or other who's gotten a million miles out of a car with all original parts and only standard maintenance, but that's not the usual experience. If you amortize all of the cost of up-trended maintenance costs and sudden, large purchases (like when a tranny gets smoked--and these are the hardest on low-income families because they can't make a sudden investment in anything, regardless of what the upside is), you'll see that new, warrantied cars are indeed more expensive, but not *nearly* as much as you probably thought. (Considering a brand new $25k 2005 model against a 2002 model and a 1997 model, both of which were equivalently priced when new, you'll find the difference in total cost of ownership about $45/month and $60/month respectively if the "average" amount of stuff goes wrong with the used, non-warrantied cars. And if you think the extended warranty is a good deal...well, let's just say I have a bridge you might be interested in. So you can have a brand new 2005 Chrysler minivan for $360/month, or a used 8-year old for about $300/month--and this monthly fee will be unpredictably collected at that.)
Also, you'll see that many of the benefits of all this new-fangled technology we're paying for actually makes used cars more expensive to maintain in the long run. Used to be you could go to the auto parts store and throw a new distributor on your car. Used to be you could change your own engine coolant. Now with cars being closed systems, you have to pay a mechanic to do much of this long-term work, pumping up the cost of keeping these older cars.
No they won't. In 1989 my dad bought a Dodge Omni, stripped...the only option was a rear window defroster, it didn't have A/C, automatic tranny, power steering, brakes, doors, windows, nuttin'. He paid $5800.
Now look at the cheapest car money can buy, discounting the Hyundais and the Kias (we're going to keep the quality/power level approximately the same...that Omni was a car, not a lawn mower). The equivalent car now is probably the Ford Focus. Stripped, it's like $11k. Did inflation nearly halve the value of a dollar in the last 15 years? No, on the contrary, inflation has been rather low. What happened, then? Air bags and computer chips.
I'm not necessarily complaining here, though I do think that when you require all cars be made with airbags, that's not very compassionate to the lowest-earning 15% or so of society that now finds even the cheapest car to be way beyond their means. This limits their potential job opportunities to jobs that happen to be on public transportation routes, meaning that they must choose from a much more limited pool of possible employment situations than normal. Thus, the cycle perpetuates. (And besides, public tranny ain't cheap either--I live in the San Fran bay area, and I moved to a new apartment that has commuter access to SF. I was overjoyed at first...but it turns out, I never use it--it's way cheaper to drive my car and pay exhorbitant parking rates in the city. If that's true for me, and I'm fairly middle class, how do low-income families swing it?)
For most people, the cars we buy are way beyond transportation and we identify ourselves with them. We must have air or the leather seats or the sport suspension. For these people, a car is nothing short of independence, though, and we rob them of that independence when we raise the floor on cars.
Cars aren't the only place this happens either--another good example would be if the anti-cruelty people were successful in passing laws requiring that all chickens be free range, or all veggies be organice. Then there'd be a significant chunk of the population that would find they have to cut back on their grocery bills every month and buy less, or further compromise already poor eating habits. Are we willing to trade human lives for animal comfort? Certainly, there's a balance we have to strike here, but if everyone were vegan/vegetarian/organic-only/"humane"-only, food would cost a heck of a lot more.
I'm just shocked that anyone still thinks priests are super-human people that can force down those kinds of urges for a lifetime, given the recent scandals. It's just such a...I dunno...naive and quaint way of looking at the world.
Well, I guess I would agree that pot is a pretty good analogy for your case. However, I'd also point out that, if we're going with this analogy, it's not at all clear that our laws regarding marijuana are beneficial overall to society. I'm not a big legalize drugs type of guy, but when you consider the number of tax dollars we're spending on jailing people for relatively light pot offenses, it does seem wildly out of proportion. I've heard the gateway drug speech like a thousand times, but then again, I know a lot of kids in high school that played around with pot, and most of them didn't go on to crack or heroin or even cigarettes. Most of them simply stopped using pot once they left high school or college.
I'm having a tough time following you. I don't see how porn saps society of moral strength. You'll have to develop that into an actual argument for me to see the path from premises to conclusions you're drawing.
As far as rape being common--common compared to what? There's much higher rates of rape in other parts of the world that aren't as sexualized as the US. Most of the rape that goes on in the world actually has less to do with sex and more to do with exerting force or making a show of power...it is a function of extreme limits on societal freedoms, not oversexualization within the population. If you don't believe this, look at fundamentalist Islamic countries where rape of women is much more common...this is an expression of power over women, not an side effect of the oversexualization of them. Look at rates of rape in unstable situations such as Rwanda and other warring parts of Africa. Compare this to rates of rape in places like France and Amsterdam, which are even more overtly sexual than the US, and you'll begin to see my point. Rape is about an imbalance and expression of power over women, not sex. As a capper to this argument, I'll point out that it's not even to do with women, necessarily! Look at our own prison system here in the US, where heterosexual men rape other heterosexual men every day as expressions of power over them. It's just too clear-cut to ignore.
If you look at things like rape and sex from a rational standpoint, instead of idealogical one (whether informed by religion or politics), you begin to see that things generally get healthier as we afford the general population more freedoms, not less. Following the religious ideal to the extreme, one would think that no sexual displays would increase the "respect" men have for women. But we look at countries that require women to go around in burkas, covered head-to-toe, and we see the exact opposite. Meanwhile, France has women running around bare-breasted on network TV, viewed by all ages, and it's the exact opposite.
The real problem here, I think, is the unnatural subversion of a basic human urge (one that is shared by both men and women). I understand very well the reason why organized religion would like people to feel guilty about sexual urges. Sexual thoughts are things that no one can avoid by design, and if the church is selling a panacea to address guilt and it can simultaneously get the people to buy into a belief system that manufactures that guilt on an hourly basis, that's just good business.
The real question is, are women sex objects? Are men? The answer is, yes! Not always, but some of the time people are sex objects to other people, pure and simple, and there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, without that tendency, some other organism would have come along a long time ago and knocked us out of contention altogether. (Yes, that means I'm buying into evolution theory.)
It's true. Nearly all priests have used pornography during their priesthood, and the majority use it consistently. Actual numbers are hard to come by, but when anonymous independent polls have been conducted of celibate priests, nearly every one shows more than 50% are or have been involved in long-term affairs (more than 1 year). Some will find even more shocking that the priesthood tends to attract a slightly higher proportion of gay men than are present in the population. Since being gay and being religious causes a deep internal conflict, those gays who are devoted to religion oftentimes see the priesthood as a viable option in life since the alternative is either lonely or what they themselves see as deviant. There is some evidence that even suggests that gayness combined with the deep-seated stigma propagated by the Catholic church about all sex, particularly homosexual sex, coupled with the psychosexual stunting of those who enter seminary in the early stages of puberty can result in extreme, unhealthy mental pressures that result in the pedophilia scandals that have plagued the church for the past 50 years. Even more telling than the studies is how the church has handled these cases over the last several decades--a complete and total unwillingness to deal directly with them belies something a bit deeper in the shared psychology of church officials.
Obviously, this is a very sensitive topic that most of the public doesn't particularly want to know or think about, so it's not out there in our faces every day. But if you dig a little, it doesn't take much to start turning up evidence that, guess what, priests are actually people too.
Well, far as I understand, a cogent argument results in a conclusion that is based on a set of premises. I guess I was having a difficult time identifying your premises and the argument that connects them to your conclusion.
Then again, I'm not that smart. It could be your argument is relying a bit too heavily on the enthymematic and that's why I'm not getting it.
Well, in the US we typically label the left "liberal" and the right "conservative", and these labels have stuck with some basis in reality, but it's important to understand that no label can possibly characterize a thing so nuanced as a political worldview.
So where do these labels come from? The non-political definitions of the term liberal revolve around the idea of not being constrained by tradition, orthodoxy, etc, while conservative means favoring traditional views and generally being opposed to change. Note that these are not directly opposing viewpoints, in the sense that where liberal does not mean disfavoring all traditional views and always being for change, nor does conservative mean being constrained by tradition.
If we dogmatically insist that the term liberal is meant literally when applied in politics, that would mean a liberal's core belief system is informed only by change. In other words, if you're liberal and pro-choice, it's not because you believe pro-choice is the most ethical position, it's just that you understand it to be different from what has been done traditionally. To remain truly liberal in the literal sense, though, such a person would have to recognize that, at some point, they'd have to become pro-life because pro-choice has been around long enough to become traditional. (It's already been around since Roe v. Wade.)
(Incidentally, maybe this is why John Kerry is a flip-flopper. Maybe he doesn't understand that he's not to take the term liberal seriously, and it's actually ok to hold a view even after it's become accepted by a majority. Just kiddin'. Jeez, don't be so uptight.)
So clearly, there are some situations where reality flouts the label; there are cases where liberals want to uphold tradition and conservatives want to change something they see as not working. I'm always put off by discussions that focus more on semantics than substance, such as the argument over whether someone is "pro-choice" or "pro-abortion", or "anti-choice" or "pro-life". It's dishonest to try and abandon the context of these nuanced positions. The two sides ought to be called "pro-choice" and "anti-abortion", which is a fair and charitable assessment of where they each stand, I think. (Perhaps "pro-choice" is a bit more charitable...after all, pro-choice people don't support choice in all cases, only when it comes to the issue of abortion, so it is a bit more charitable than perhaps it should be to that side of the debate. Anyone got anything better?) It always kills me when we the people let the participants in the debate come up with these labels themselves...they always get the most extreme labeling installed that they can sneak past us because it's to their advantage to do so.
In the case of pornography, both parties to the transaction are willing. Those who make porn are obviously willing to make it, and those who view it are obviously willing to view it. If the effects of this transaction do not promote behavior that derives anyone else of any freedoms in a direct and demonstrable way, then it's protected. The Founding Fathers did not believe it was government's place to "save one from oneself". It is the place of government to save one from the unethical and unjustifiable actions of others. This is the clear and overriding purpose of the Tenth Amendment.
I'm responding to your post in the hopes that I can help you to increase awareness about the very important issue of bigotry directed at atheists, as well as agnostics, which seems to have gone completely unmentioned in this discussion up until now.
Specifically, I'm interested in increasing my awareness of such bigotry, since I am agnostic, most of my friends are atheists, and none of us have ever been on the receiving end of any such bigotry to my knowledge.
On the prayer-in-school thing, the discussion is nonsensical. How can you stop someone from praying? Orwellian stopthink tactics? Allowing people* to do whatever they want is not the same thing as promoting it, even if there's more than one of those people, and they do stuff out loud. Should the school start devoting resources to supporting such gatherings such as class time or public tax money, that's promotion. But simply allowing a student to pray or express their own religious beliefs (provided it does not disrupt the main function of the school, which is to educate children, in any way) is not promotion.
* For the purposes of this discussion, the term people includes children.
Ooh! I love Q&A!
- "Fixed wing" aircraft (as opposed to "fixed wings") have no difficulty flying.
- Hmm...this is a hard one. Livestock, maybe?
- This one's not a question. I just realized that neither is 1.
So, did I win an iPod?I was about to come up with some clever play on words about how you were commenting on someone else's misunderstanding of irony without understanding it yourself. That is, until I read your post carefully and I realized: You're 100% right.
It is sensible and consistent to hate intolerance in all its forms. Being tolerant implies that one believes others should be tolerant as well. Therefore, others who are intolerant would not enjoy support from those who are both tolerant and rational.
So the question is, is the grandparent's author unaware of what irony is, or unaware of what tolerance is? He is perhaps confusing tolerance with acceptance. Tolerance means I'll tolerate you, but I don't have to like it; it just means I'll put up with it. One can be tolerant of gays without supporting their lifestyle, for instance. Acceptance of the gay lifestyle, on the other hand, means that you more than just tolerate it, you think it's an equally valid way of life. This is important because it allows one to see how someone could be against gay marriage and still be considered tolerant of gays, i.e., no one's saying people can't be gay, just that society will not accord those people certain privileges.
In the crunchy-granola, PC nineties I think that many people have perhaps made the mistake of equating tolerance and acceptance, and they're not the same thing.
There are religious and non-religious people who enjoy religion, too. My religion prof in college was atheist, but dedicated his life to studying religion and derived more from religion, in terms of how he lived his life and made decisions, than most religious people.
I haven't done the experiment, but I'd be willing to try this out--every time you see a sentence that contains the word religion, replace it with pornography and see if that statement could possibly be true. In discussions revolving around censoring either, I think you'll have a fairly high hit rate:
- Society should do away with X, because it causes some people to behave in illegal and deviant ways.
- Excessive amounts of X can harm the normal development of children.
- People spend way too much money on X, money that could be used to better ends for society.
Hmm...makes you think, doesn't it?The relationship of the big 3 religions to sex is schizophrenic at best. That's why Muslim women who've been raped are shamed, disowned, or stoned to death; furthermore, this is seen as the valid application of law in some parts of the world. (Question: How many people have to believe in something for it to become a "real" part of that belief system? I don't understand how some Muslims can flatly say, "That's not real Islam," when so many Muslims clearly believe and practice such acts as though they are concordant with "real Islam".) It's also why the majority of Catholic "celibate" priests carry on affairs, and nearly all of them use pornography to varying extents. And it's why, in some cases, these priests turn into pedophiles...many of these pedophile priests entered the seminary around puberty, and the conflict between their bodies and their minds created an irreconcilable situation that ultimately expresses itself in the form of deviant behavior.
These religions depend on subverting humankind's most powerful urge to gain the moral high ground, pure and simple. Make people feel that sex is dirty, make them feel self-conscious about it, and they'll feel guilty that it's inexorably intertwined in their thoughts on a daily basis. Offer them the prospect of freeing them from that guilt through regular participation in the church, and you've got a successful business model that will keep them coming back.
There are important practical reasons to discuss these things from early age onwards. In my experience, many religious people have not explored their beliefs in the context of reconciling those beliefs with reality. This is not to say that religion can not be reconciled with reality to a great degree, just that most of the people I've spoken with throughout my life have not made the attempt.
But this is very important when a significant number of people hold a worldview that is significantly informed by such a system of beliefs. Many of these religious people I've known draw conclusions from their basic set of religious beliefs that do not at all follow, on any variety of topics (evolution probably being the most prominent). It is important that people retain their ability to think critically alongside religious beliefs to ensure they don't begin using religion as a crutch, a stand-in for critical thought and reasoning.
Remember, Andrea Yates killed her children because she believed god told her it was the right thing to do. Many people scoff at this example initially until they consider my point from a philosophical perspective. If you believe in god, what if he did tell her to kill her children? Isn't it at least possible? Doesn't he work in mysterious ways, after all? And who are we, as a society, to question Yates' actions if she was working under a divine directive? Shouldn't we at least try to rule out this out as a possibility? How would we go about doing such a thing? If you are religious and you haven't thought about such knotty issues that come along with these religious beliefs, perhaps you should.
A physicist friend of mine recently said to me: It's very difficult to explain to someone why it's important to invest millions of dollars in keeping the Hubble telescope running when that person thinks there are physically incarnate beings flitting around called angels that influence their everyday lives in real, physical ways. [source 1] [source 2] He's right--a disconnect from reality can be very dangerous, even a very tiny disconnect, if it's believed by enough people.
I like how you said, "Here, I would argue..." (my emphasis). You would? Well, then, why don't you? I'm listenin'.
Nice try, but I'm still not buying it. I know people in several sectors that are experiencing a pick-up, blue collar and white collar. For instance, the trucking industry is picking up and everyone that's involved is getting back to work...dispatchers, drivers, dock workers, terminal managers, bindery clerks, truck mechanics, etc. I know a secretary that have been on unemployment that just found a job. I know a lawyer that just found a job after doing contract work for a couple of years. The jobless phase of the jobless recovery is over.
Everyone doesn't have to switch fields, nor would that be good for the economy. (That's not to say some people don't have to switch fields--if you were answering phones in a call center, you're now pretty much irrelevant. Some churn is good--we do need to make sure our resources are being directed in the most efficient means, and if India can provide more efficiency right now in call center processing, then that's just the "creative destruction" of capitalism...of course, whether they are more efficient at handling this is debatable, but you get the point. If we never lost certain job functions, we still have 1950s-style switchboard operators putting our calls through.)
I think you see from the above passage it's not only my personal luck informing my statements. Actually, as I said originally, it's not luck, and it's not even the anecdotal evidence I'm presenting of all these people, who were in unsteady job positions or just straight-out unemployed, suddenly getting jobs. It's the experience of job searching that each of them has reported to me that is really behind my attitude--they're all saying that after 24-36 months of a whole lot of nothing, this last few months of job searching has been very active. (Just for the record, this is geographically restricted to the LA, SD, SF, and Chicago job markets.) For three years or so I've been doing software contracting and those contracts have been hard to come by until about a year ago...get a call for a job, and I'd take it b/c who knows how long until the next one. This time, totally different experience...lots of companies hiring. This has nothing to do with "luck" and a lot more to do with...well, companies hiring, I guess.
I never said management was the first to go in a bad economy. I said it was the last to feel a recovery from a bad economy. You're statement is correct--labor is the first to go. What I said was, labor is also the first to come back, before management. (I always try to understand an argument before I rebut it...that's just what I do.)
Well, strictly speaking, neither Democrats nor Republicans can do much of anything to change the economy short-term, in the space of a few years here and there. We've had a bad go of it the last couple of years because of the dot com bust--not because of Clinton, or Bush, or anything to do with what anyone's political ideology wants them to believe. Basic macroecon...the president can have small, barely
Yea, I see what you mean. How about the level is attached to the month and year it was assigned? So you have a level 5 May 2004, which is slower than a level 5 October 2004.
I think the whole levels thing is probably a non-starter idea. If you double processor speed but halve the amount of RAM, have you changed the level of a PC? You could obviously do quite a bit of varying these independent aspects of a system without changing its level, but clearly they'd be different PCs used for different purposes. This levels thing just isn't going to work.
I'm not sure I like where this is going. I'm trapped deep in a pile of rubble, waiting to be rescued...
You know, I keep hearing about how bad the economy is, and I was starting to believe it myself. But I'm in software development, the first field to be hit by the downturn and one of the first fields to start recovering (after financial institutions--they always feel it first). Well for the last year or so, I've had no trouble finding work, and things have really picked up lately. I'm in Silicon Valley and during my latest job search, I put my resume up on DICE and was getting 3-5 calls per day.
I just signed to take a job yesterday. My brother graduated six months ago with an MBA, and management is traditionally the last sector to recover, and he just locked up a job as well. (Yes, management is the last to recover--when companies are unsure about money, they hire the people on the front lines and try to make that work before they start bringing in middle managers to manage the projects they've created.)
I was starting to believe the Kerry hype over the last year or so, but this latest experience with this job search I just went through, turning down offers and having multiple offers on the table at one time, all while in the industry supposedly hardest hit by all of this outsourcing...I'm thinking Bush is right after all. The economy is on an upswing and it's only a matter of months before everyone feels it.
It's too bad that if Kerry gets elected, everyone's going to think that he somehow magically did something to recover the economy in his first couple of months, because that's how long it'll take before things are back in full swing. As if that was even possible. It's like when 9/11 happened, the Dems are saying, Hey, that happened on Bush's watch. Not fair, people. You don't have a weak-kneed (when it comes to foreign policy) Democrat in office for 8 years who doesn't take any kind of stance against terrorism, and then we get hit 8 months after Bush is in office, and "it happened on his watch."
Anyway, to the main point. This post above, however close to home these job losses have struck, it's anecdotal. (Sorry, but it's true.) My bro and I getting jobs is also anecdotal, but our experience during the job search is not. One does not receive several calls a day and competing offers in the hardest-hit industry in a bad economy. It just doesn't happen--I should know, I lived through it the previous three years or so.