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Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Discussions about the economic and financial ramifications of PEAK OIL

Re: Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Unread postby Xenophobe » Sat 05 Feb 2011, 14:56:20

Plantagenet wrote:If you are going to require the invention of entirely new kinds of misery before you accept that peak oil occurred in 2005, then there in no convincing you.


Are you implying that some majority of peak oilers, pre-2005 peak, weren't supposing all kinds of types of OLD misery, except much more dramatic? The starvation and nuke war alone scenarios would cover that question.

Someone supposing that peak oil would cause generally lower crude oil prices than the 1970's energy crisis and a deep recession followed by recovery within about 18 months would have been laughed off the boards as a ridiculous cornucopian.
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Re: Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Unread postby Plantagenet » Sat 05 Feb 2011, 15:12:40

Xenophobe wrote:
Plantagenet wrote:If you are going to require the invention of entirely new kinds of misery before you accept that peak oil occurred in 2005, then there in no convincing you.


...some majority of peak oilers, pre-2005 peak... supposing ... starvation and nuke war alone scenarios


Sorry to disappoint you. All thats happened so far is global economic recession.
Would you be satisfied with a double-dip recession or will you insist on a nuclear war before you accept peak oil is now affecting the global economy? :roll:
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Re: Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Unread postby Xenophobe » Sat 05 Feb 2011, 15:24:45

Plantagenet wrote:
Xenophobe wrote:
Plantagenet wrote:If you are going to require the invention of entirely new kinds of misery before you accept that peak oil occurred in 2005, then there in no convincing you.


...some majority of peak oilers, pre-2005 peak... supposing ... starvation and nuke war alone scenarios


Sorry to disappoint you. All thats happened so far is global economic recession.


Someone supposing that THAT would be the consequence of peak oil, 6 years in, would also have been dismissed as a cornucopian.

Plantagent wrote:Would you be satisfied with a double-dip recession or will you insist on a nuclear war before you accept peak oil is now affecting the global economy? :roll:


A douple dip recession was what we got from the peak oil in 1979, so that seems reasonable. The nuke war scenario's have always been ridiculous, but only now do the revisionists recognize it. Even they can't ignore 6 years of historical fact, at least the more intelligent ones.

They are few and far between of course. Instead, in 2004, we got this for a "long range projection".

Dale Allen Pfeiffer, 2004

"Oil production will begin its decline in 2007 or 2008. At that point repression, both at home and abroad, will begin in earnest. The economy will soon collapse completely (if it does not do so before 2007). People will feel the crunch, and they will become desperate. If you are not prepared in a supportive community intent on transitioning to self-sufficiency, then your chances of surviving are drastically reduced."

So...obviously here we have someone who didn't anticipate peak plateau. We apparently have been suffering "repression" as of late, although I'm not sure if that was a typo for "recession" or not. How desperate do you think people have been, some 7 years after this prediction? Seen any collapsed economies around not caused by an earthquake or flood recently? Let alone in the US? We got a recession. It ended last year. How is your survival? Are you in a self sufficient community? I certainly am not. Don't even have any Amish around here.

No...if anyone dared suggest that years after peak oil all we would have is a recession, locally or globally, they would have been banned from this place as a cornie troll. Certainly they never would have been recognized as a reasonable prognosticator.
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Re: Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Sat 05 Feb 2011, 16:23:50

Whatever the root cause (and there could be several, IMO -- technology is the obvious one to me) -- there is a new reality we need to come to grips with:

There is going to be a structurally high unemployment rate in this country for a LONG time, if we don't intellligently alter policies to deal with it. (I say this because TECHNOLOGY is driving a lot of it. If automation can make most things more efficiently and cheaper than people -- automation will end up doing a larger share of the work. This shift is clearly accelerating in response to increased pressure to manage costs to be competitive.)

To me, the key question is, how bad do things have to get before we actually deal with the fundamental issues involved, instead of (from Capitol hill on down) throwing rocks at each other and trying to score political points?

Some simple ideas (which NEITHER party is making a REAL effort to utilize, from what I can see):


1). Encourage job sharing through the tax code. There are lots of folks who need work, and half a job is far better than no job.

2). Provide low skilled government jobs. At moderate pay (still a lot better than no job). There are all kinds of things that need to be done. Just elder care (and assistance) is a daunting task, and this will be a major growth industry in the first world as the polulation ages. Infrastructure would be another example. Hell, even basic healthcare jobs like helping transport sick patients through the healthcare maze -- if we have government run healthcare, why can't government provide good candidates for jobs like these?

3). Combine 1 and 2. Maybe 50-somethings can't do moderately physical work 8 hours a day, but they might well be able to handle 4 hours a day.

4). Better education and especially meaningful retraining opportunities. Hell, instead of proposing to give people basically endless unemployment, how about letting people EARN better opportunities through retraining/education? It's no guarantee for everyone, but it should sure help, with so many employers citing poor skills as a key reason for not hiring -- AND -- the superior basic educational system so much of the rest of the world now has compared to the US.

5). Longer term, we need to be looking at the reality of the long term unemployed who actually WANT a job. Are we going to just let a larger and larger segment of the polulation languish? People who are willing to work, to be retrained, to move, to be flexible on their job choice? (I'm not talking about people who are unwilling to do anything but X at an unrealistic salary, or who only want something for nothing).

What do we do when these folks rise in number to 20%, 30% or even 50%? There is only so long you can expect people to "behave well" when conditions get bad enough long enough. Egypt seems to be a pretty good current example of that.

But no. We seem to be convinced that fighting, believing in BAU, believing in corporate profits (or GDP) as the ONLY measure of overall economic health is the way to go, and keep kicking that can down the road.

This isn't a left or right wing problem -- it is EVERYONE'S problem. But, alas, I predict just more insistence that electing THIS candidate or THAT party will make all this better. :roll:

(edit - cleaned up a few minor typos)
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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Re: Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Unread postby vision-master » Sat 05 Feb 2011, 17:00:13

Xenophobe wrote:
vision-master wrote:Not only has this already happened, also the Apocalypse has begun.

Unaware sheeple like X are still hanging onto the old patriarchaly ways of the past.....


Of course the Apocalypse has begun, just ask David Koresch or any of the other religious nutbags who, since the writing of the Bible, have been claiming it. They see apocalypse under their bed pillows. So Vision sees it while he reads Chariots of the Gods...big deal. His grandkids will be seeing it 40 years from now.

How about those earthquakes opening up a portal to another universe, how did that turn out? Those webbots sure got it going on, don't they Vision?


You don't even know what it means... :lol:

Better use Google an learn something.......

Have you been feeling kind of sheeply lately? :badgrin:
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Re: Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Unread postby Serial_Worrier » Sat 05 Feb 2011, 17:45:11

mos6507 wrote:
Serial_Worrier wrote:Oh you want a neo-WPA program? To build what?


These would be a good start.


More windmills. :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
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Re: Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Unread postby Daniel_Plainview » Sat 05 Feb 2011, 20:36:31

Xenophobe wrote:I believe that this "interdisciplinary nature" of PO is one of those revisionist concepts as well. For example, are you aware of a single reference or claim, created prior to the most recent peak in 2005, which argues that peak oil can be effected, either negatively or positively, by the application of the science of the sociology? I would argue that most debates against peak oil argue that sociology doesn't matter in the least, that people are people, won't change, and will all die because of it.


Xeno, I was referring to the reverse situation, namely, how peak oil affects society (sociology) rather than how sociology affects PO. Given that modern industrial societies are utterly dependent on the availability of cheap oil, it follows that capitalistic societies in their current form will collapse when cheap oil vanishes. Thus, PO has grave sociological implications.

In this sense, PO theory is one of the most important considerations for a forward-looking sociologist, and PO theory will have growing importance to the science of sociology.
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Re: Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Unread postby Xenophobe » Sat 05 Feb 2011, 20:52:27

Daniel_Plainview wrote:
Xenophobe wrote:I believe that this "interdisciplinary nature" of PO is one of those revisionist concepts as well. For example, are you aware of a single reference or claim, created prior to the most recent peak in 2005, which argues that peak oil can be effected, either negatively or positively, by the application of the science of the sociology? I would argue that most debates against peak oil argue that sociology doesn't matter in the least, that people are people, won't change, and will all die because of it.


Xeno, I was referring to the reverse situation, namely, how peak oil affects society (sociology) rather than how sociology affects PO.


Okay. Then may I ask, after the 1979 peak, how do you think the sociology went? Certainly the fear of that peak didn't even last a few years, Americans invented the SUV and began soaking up all the fuel which showed up a few years later.

Daniel_Plainview wrote:Given that modern industrial societies are utterly dependent on the availability of cheap oil, it follows that capitalistic societies in their current form will collapse when cheap oil vanishes. Thus, PO has grave sociological implications.


Bad assumption. Oil has been getting more expensive since 1970 and industrial societies have been coping nicely. Peak demand seems to more critical to the equation in places like Japan and the US than the actual peak in 2005 itself.

Daniel Plainview wrote:In this sense, PO theory is one of the most important considerations for a forward-looking sociologist, and PO theory will have growing importance to the science of sociology.


Only if you attach undue importance to people and their transportation. Certainly during the transition to EV transport fewer and fewer people will actually care about the price of gasoline at the corner store. And this is a good thing, so we can talk about the pleasant sociological consequences of peak. I don't think that a decade after it happens (currently scheduled for 2015) most people will even have heard of it.
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Re: Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Unread postby Plantagenet » Sat 05 Feb 2011, 20:54:46

Serial_Worrier wrote:
mos6507 wrote:
Serial_Worrier wrote:Oh you want a neo-WPA program? To build what?


These would be a good start.


More windmills. :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:


For the two trillion dollars Obama wasted on bank bailouts, GM bailout, Goldman Sachs bailout, auto company bailouts, stimulus pork, supplemental budgets for government agencies, etc. the US could've built most of an entirely new infrastructure. Nukes cost about 5 billion each, so we could've had 50 new nukes---one for each state. That leaves 1.75 trillion---with that money we could've built high speech rail to network the cities, and we could've built the light rail systems we need to get workers out of their cars and into mass transit for the cities, and we could've build new electrical transmission systems to take the power from nukes, solar, wind etc. to where it is needed.

Obama let the crisis go to waste----instead of recognizing the economic problems were linked to the peak oil problem and responding by getting going on a new infrastructure Obama and the democrats spent trillions propping up BAU for two more years and leaving us with 3 trillion in new debt, an even more bloated federal government that produces unsustainable deficits, and an unconstitutional healthcare bill.
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Re: Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Unread postby mos6507 » Sun 06 Feb 2011, 11:18:04

Serial_Worrier wrote:More windmills. :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:


What do you have against windmills? You'd rather we just keep paying the unemployed to sit on their asses?

Seriously, some people really need to keep some sort of link to pragmatic reality rather than just sitting back with a bag of popcorn and heckling everything.
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Re: Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Unread postby Lore » Sun 06 Feb 2011, 12:21:58

Plantagenet wrote:For the two trillion dollars Obama wasted on bank bailouts, GM bailout, Goldman Sachs bailout, auto company bailouts, stimulus pork, supplemental budgets for government agencies, etc. the US could've built most of an entirely new infrastructure. Nukes cost about 5 billion each, so we could've had 50 new nukes---one for each state. That leaves 1.75 trillion---with that money we could've built high speech rail to network the cities, and we could've built the light rail systems we need to get workers out of their cars and into mass transit for the cities, and we could've build new electrical transmission systems to take the power from nukes, solar, wind etc. to where it is needed.

Obama let the crisis go to waste----instead of recognizing the economic problems were linked to the peak oil problem and responding by getting going on a new infrastructure Obama and the democrats spent trillions propping up BAU for two more years and leaving us with 3 trillion in new debt, an even more bloated federal government that produces unsustainable deficits, and an unconstitutional healthcare bill.



Ehhh... you've got your TARP confused with your Economic stimulus package, two different Presidencies. As far as high speed rail, Republican governors have been turning down ear marked dollars for their states to implement them.
The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
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Re: Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Unread postby Xenophobe » Sun 06 Feb 2011, 12:58:29

mos6507 wrote:Seriously, some people really need to keep some sort of link to pragmatic reality rather than just sitting back with a bag of popcorn and heckling everything.


Look at where you are! Peak oil zealots are all about no link to reality, sitting back and cheering on whatever scheme they think might bring on the Rapture. Its what they DO, its what they ARE.

So let them dream up whatever they'd like, those of us based firmly in reality certainly aren't going to change their fundamental religious beliefs.
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Re: Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Unread postby Daniel_Plainview » Sun 06 Feb 2011, 21:49:32

Xenophobe wrote:Okay. Then may I ask, after the 1979 peak, how do you think the sociology went? Certainly the fear of that peak didn't even last a few years, Americans invented the SUV and began soaking up all the fuel which showed up a few years later.


You're implying that the SUV was invented sometime after the 1970's. That is incorrect. For example, there's the 1946 Jeep Station Wagon:

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And the 1942 Dodge Carryall

Image

So Americans were using gas-guzzling SUVs long before the 1970's.
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Re: Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Unread postby Xenophobe » Sun 06 Feb 2011, 22:14:16

Daniel_Plainview wrote:
You're implying that the SUV was invented sometime after the 1970's. That is incorrect. For example, there's the 1946 Jeep Station Wagon:

So Americans were using gas-guzzling SUVs long before the 1970's.


SUV's were certainly in existence long before the 1979 peak oil, you are right. Bronco's and International Harvesters, Jeeps. But there was so much crude around in the 1980's which needed to be soaked up that they became more than just occasional use, roadtrip machines, farm use devices. Instead, they were sold as "you need these to get your kid to school in case the road is broken and you need 4X4 to get through".

You can see them mixed into this graph as Light truck I believe.
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Re: Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Unread postby Daniel_Plainview » Mon 07 Feb 2011, 13:44:45

Just How Ugly Is The Truth Of America's Unemployment? It is "One Sick Puppy"

JOBS DATA REDUX — ADDING MORE MEAT TO THE BONE

It is laughable that everyone believes the labour market in the U.S.A. is improving. Lost in the debate over the weather impact was the benchmark revision to 2010 — overstated by 215k or 24%. The U.S. economy generated 909k jobs last year, which works out to just under 76k per month. That is insignificant considering that the population grew around 160k per month. The level of U.S. employment today stands at 130.265 million, which is where it was in January 2003.

The data from the Household survey are truly insane. The labour force has plunged an epic 764k in the past two months. The level of unemployment has collapsed 1.2 million, which has never happened before. People not counted in the labour force soared 753k in the past two months.

These numbers are simply off the charts and likely reflect the throngs of unemployed people starting to lose their extended benefits and no longer continuing their job search (for the two-thirds of them not finding a new job). These folks either go on welfare or they rely on their spouse or other family members or friends for support.


... This U.S. labour market is still one sick puppy. The fact that 2.8 million Americans said they had given up on their job search in January was overshadowed by the debates surrounding the weather impact on the headline. ... The civilian population rose 1.872 million last year. At the same time, the labour force fell 167k. Those not in the labour force soared 2.094 million. Just in January, we saw 319,000 people drop out of the work force. These numbers are incredible. This is a highly dysfunctional labour market. People are falling through the cracks at an alarming rate as they come off their extended jobless benefits — “doubling up” as Bob Hebert put it — and we have traders and economists debating the weather effects of a nonfarm payroll data-point that will most assuredly get revised no fewer than three times in the next couple of years. ... We have a situation now where a record near-20% of total personal income is coming in the form of government assistance, whether that be in Social Security, food stamps, or the unprecedented expansion of jobless benefits. But to be calling for a labour market recovery when real compensation per hour is declining at a 0.6% annual rate is [perverse].



ZH
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Re: Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Unread postby kiwichick » Mon 07 Feb 2011, 19:11:31

population growth exceeding job growth

this is by far the worst us recession since WW2

increasing technology is continually replacing manual labour

economists talk about 4% unemployment being FULL employment

hello??
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Re: Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Unread postby Ludi » Mon 07 Feb 2011, 19:23:47

kiwichick wrote:increasing technology is continually replacing manual labour



It's the way of the future! 8O
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Re: Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Unread postby Xenophobe » Mon 07 Feb 2011, 20:36:59

kiwichick wrote:population growth exceeding job growth

this is by far the worst us recession since WW2


Yes. Which is why we are ALL glad it is over.

kiwichick wrote:increasing technology is continually replacing manual labour

economists talk about 4% unemployment being FULL employment

hello??


4% unemployment WAS full employment. There is always some slack, people changing jobs, and that transitionary group is about 4% in size. Certainly they would hire anyone to do a job back when unemployment was that low, everyone was begging for bodies.

Don't feel bad for the real estate agents who can't find work, they were anomalies in a bubble economy, and now can concentrate on finding work which pays them what their skills are worth, rather than some ridiculous commission based on bubble economics.
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Re: Employment Report: IT SUCKS

Unread postby Vogelzang » Mon 07 Feb 2011, 20:53:43

Vote Republican!
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