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Thursday, January 31, 2013
Google Peels Away Some of North Korea's Mystery
Google has added more detail to its map of North Korea this week, giving users a better glimpse into the infrastructure of the highly secretive country. Much of the map is still relatively blank compared with Google's detailed maps of other countries. In some parts, though, the map shows information such as roads, schools, parks and waterways, especially near the capital and largest city, Pyongyang.
Auto Loan Reccomendations - The Hull Truth - Boating and Fishing ...
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| Senior Member ?Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Too far from salt. Posts: 2,682 | Don't you belong to a bank or credit union? Do you really have to ask where to find a loan? Google, best auto loans. Jeez |
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Like others have said, shop your local credit union, but don't hesitate to haggle with dealer financing as well, as they can sometimes offer lower rates as they bring many loans to different banks. | |
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| ? Join Date: May 2005 Location: Pompano Beach, FL Posts: 6,014 | Try penfed.org It'll take a week or so to get the check, and they aren't the brightest, but they are dirt cheap. That's a big benefit when you're dealing with a car manufacturer that doesn't have great rates on their more popular models. Penfed right now is 1.49% for a 5 year loan I believe. The usual, you apply online and they mail you a check that you can make out to the car dealer. You have to be "a member" but you can join on their site for $20. Totally legit. __________________2004 Cape Horn 31
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Sometimes people have a great experience with a particular company in these situations that is why I asked. Of course I have a bank to go to but prefer not to deal with Wells Fargo. | |
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| Senior Member ?Join Date: Mar 2006 Location: South Carolina Posts: 7,166 | I have a friend who buys car paper for a bank all day long. He went to a credit union as they had a better rate than his banks employee rate.
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| Member ?Join Date: Jan 2007 Posts: 78 | credit union, local bank. Just get informed, dealership may be the best around. I would definitely know what I could get elsewhere and then make the dealer work to match or beat it. |
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Source: http://www.thehulltruth.com/dockside-chat/481950-auto-loan-reccomendations.html
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Monster storm expected to explode in Atlantic. It may be one for the books.
NOAA forecasters say an unnamed extra-tropical storm will experience explosive intensification over the North Atlantic this weekend. Its central low pressure could rival a category 4 hurricane's.
Forecasters are predicting explosive intensification this weekend for an extra-tropical storm in the North Atlantic that is expected to eclipse the intensity of last October's superstorm Sandy.
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Unlike Sandy, the nameless North Atlantic superstorm poses no threat to land. But it does highlight the power such storms can attain.
It's forecast to develop winds of up to 98 miles an hour, while the air pressure at its center ? expected to reach a low between 920 to 930 millibars ? would rival that of a category 4 hurricane, according to forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Ocean Prediction Center in College Park, Md.
The system is the same storm "that gave us some snow a couple of days ago in DC," says Robert Banks, a forecaster at the Ocean Prediction Center. The storm intensified as the cold air moved out over relatively warm North Atlantic water, which is feeding energy into the system.
In addition, the system is merging with two other upper-level troughs ? providing the storm with yet more punch.
It's not clear how this storm will fare in the record books, Mr. Banks says. But over at the Weather Underground's web site, data gathered by British weather historian Stephen Burt shows five other storms between 1824 and 1986 with central pressures ranging from 920.2 to 925.6 millibars.
An extra-tropical superstorm in January 1993 holds the record for low pressure ? 913 millibars ? for North Atlantic winter storms in an event that destroyed an oil tanker after it ran aground at the Shetland Islands. The tanker, the MV Braer, was carrying 85,000 tons of crude oil.
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Web Design Auckland Company Launches New Improved Content ...
New Zealand based web design Auckland company 123 Online is proud to announce the launch of their new user-friendly content management system. 123 Online provides an affordable solution for ecommerce businesses that generates a high quality business website at a fraction of competitor?s costs.
?Current content management systems brought into use by most small to medium sized businesses are usually so complex that only skilled web users and webmasters can take full advantage of them,? said 123 Online?s Project Manager Trent McDiarmid.
McDiarmid explained that valuable resources are wasted on waiting for specially hired IT management consultants or in-house IT staff to examine current content management systems and rectify problems.
He added that over time, the cost of updating ecommerce sites using off site freelancers becomes prohibitive. Until now, the only alternative has been spending hours of valuable time training one or two employees to do the job of an IT consultant or in-house specialist. As a result, complex, difficult to use, elaborate CMS? are largely wasted.
Web Developers at 123 Online tackled user ability issues and other IT problems facing business owners and employees head on. By listening to the customer, they discovered the precise features most users like while also identifying the most disliked, or confusing CMS features.
123 Online has invested a considerable amount of time and money customising their new Content Management System based upon client feedback, and have custom designed a new, improved CMS that is as simple to navigate and as intuitive as possible.
McDiarmid goes onto say, ?Our CMS software was developed for the end user, and features incredible user ability, smooth performance, and is more time and cost efficient. The intuitive design and user friendly features make content management processes faster and easier. This means 123 Online customers can spend more time on improving and expanding their businesses and less time on managing their websites and on-page SEO content.?
123 Online offers a sleek, high?end design and an organisational structure designed to cater to small to medium business?s needs.
The web design process?involves Sales Consultants, Project Managers, Designers, Developers and Support Staff that larger companies enjoy.
McDiarmid continues, ?Rather than adding to the burden of one person trying to do all these jobs themselves ? often poorly ? we are a web design company helps clients to cost effectively and efficiently take the weight off of business owner?s shoulders.?
For more information, please visit: http://www.123online.co.nz/
Source: http://www.infonews.co.nz/news.cfm?id=102505
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Friday, January 25, 2013
Why Market Your Business Online? | New Wave Web and Marketing
Adults are spending more and more time on the Internet ? many of them searching for information, advice, goods, and services and looking to connect with others in their community. This means that the obvious choice for businesses is to take their marketing efforts online. Online marketing can benefit your company or business in ways traditional marketing would not.
Don?t know where to start? Below are five steps that can get your business in the right direction:
1. Build a Website. This may be the most obvious step. After all, you can?t have an internet presence if you?re not online. You can either set up your own website or hire an established company to set it up for you. The website needs to have easily navigated layouts, be filled with useful and interesting information and be free of junk or unhelpful things. Avoid using anything that will discourage a customer from lingering; this is one time when some upfront paid advice from a web designer can be well worth it and will pay itself back in no time.
2. Make your Website SEO Friendly.?The idea of search engine optimization (SEO) is to write your website?s copy (the content) in such a way that your site will appear high on the results pages of the major search engines (i.e. Google and Bing) when users perform specific keyword searches. The higher up on the results page, the more likely a user will click on your website.
3. Use PPC Advertising. Online pay per click (PPC) advertising has a large reach and is the way many sites thrive or even survive online. You can set a price that you would be willing to pay every time someone clicks on an ad that you write. You only have to pay this when someone clicks on your ad. If no one clicks on your ad, you do not have to pay. These ad formats allow you to set up a daily advertising budget and you have the freedom to cancel and restart your ads any time you want.
4. Use Blogs and Forums to your Advantage. Blogging is another way to drive qualified traffic to your website and boost your site?s ranking in the search engines and it is a great?way to help promote your business or services ? especially if you can show yourself as an expert and as someone who genuinely wants to help resolve user?s problems. Often you can do this for free. However, this option has one huge caveat??be sure to post in forums that are website promotion friendly if you intend on using your URL or emblazoning the post with your business details. In many cases, simply stating that you?re the founder/owner/director/community manager, etc. of a certain site can be sufficient to alert people to the good your company is doing online. Let them do the rest of the adding up and finding of you??consumers are intelligent.
5. Participate in Social Media. If your business does not have a Facebook ?account, get one as asoon as possible. And make sure it is optimized to get the most from it. For Facebook, you can use ads, updates and Fan pages to keep fans posted on your business happenings.?As a business, just be careful to get your business a Facebook Page and not a Profile; profiles are for individual people only and they are limited in what you can do as a business. Once you have created your page, keep updates relevant and interesting ? you want users to be engaged in and share your content.?And it doesn?t just stop there ? you can continue onto Twitter, Google +, and LinkedIn. (Hint: these are great places to share information from your website, blog posts, and forums).?Creating a coordinated social media and website traffic-building strategy for your business is a big task, and you can hire professionals to help.
Source: http://www.newwavemktg.com/blog/why-market-your-business-online-113-323/
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S&P 500 closes higher but just below 1,500
5 hrs.
The S&P 500 closed higher for the seventh-consecutive session Thursday after crossing above the 1,500 level for the first time since December 2007, but Apple ended near session lows, putting a damper on the tech-heavy Nasdaq.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 46.00 points, or 0.33 percent, to end at 13,825.33, led by Cisco and Boeing. Alcoa led the blue-chip laggards.
The Dow is up more than 5 percent so far this month, on pace for the best January performance since 1997 when the index rose 5.7 percent. The index is also within 3 percent of its all-time closing high of 14,164.53 points hit on October 9, 2007.?
The S&P 500 squeezed out a gain of 0.01 points to finish at 1,494.82, logging its first seven-day win streak since October 2006. Earlier, the index crossed above 1,500 for the first time since December 2007.?
Related: S&P Tops 1,500: Where the Market Goes From Here
Meanwhile, the Nasdaq declined 23.29 points, or 0.74 percent, to close at 3,130.38, mainly dragged by Apple. The CBOE Volatility Index (VIX), widely considered the best gauge of fear in the market, ended above 12.
Most key S&P sectors finished in positive territory, led by consumer discretionary and health care, while techs slumped.
"Even Apple can't affect this market rally," said Yu-Dee Chang, chief trader at ACE Investment Strategists. "We're at the psychological 1,500 level so we may spend some time?maybe even days?going back and forth around here. And if we don't fall off, the market has another leg up."
Chang noted that since the market lows of March 2009, the index on average has cycled between gains of 13.5 percent and declines of 7.7 percent.
"So take the low in November?a 13 percent gain would put us near 1,520 on the S&P," explained Chang. "And then people will look for reasons to pull back. And when we get to that level, we would want to be a little bit cautious."
Among earnings, Apple plunged nearly 10 percent after the world's most valuable company by market cap posted revenue that fell short of estimates and iPhone sales that missed quarterly expectations. The tech giant's stock has plunged nearly 33 percent from its all-time high of $705 last September. At least 13 brokerages slashed their price target on the company.?
Major Apple suppliers including Broadcom, Skyworks and Qualcomm also declined.?
Meanwhile, Netflix skyrocketed after the movie-streaming site posted a profit of 13 cents a share, blowing past expectations for a loss. In addition, the company handed in current-quarter guidance that topped estimates.
On the economic front, weekly jobless claims fell 5,000 to a seasonally adjusted 330,000, dropping to its lowest level in nearly five years, according to the Labor Department . Analysts polled by Reuters had expected claims to rise to 355,000 last week.
"The Fed Chairman [Ben Bernanke] said he wants to see substantial gains in the labor market before they're going to take the foot off the pedal?so this isn't enough to bring us there yet, but this is not a bad number," said Jim Iuorio, director at TJM Institutional Services.?In December, the central bank pledged to keep interest rates low until employment falls below 6.5 percent and inflation tops 2.5 percent.
"We have stock market tailwinds in Asia with the fact that they're devaluing the yen and China is providing stimulus in addition to a decent PMI?so this is not bad," continued Iuorio. "The chart is not giving us a reason to sell the stock market yet either, except for the fact that it may be a little long in the tooth."
Leading indicators gained 0.5 percent in December, according to the Conference Board. Economists polled by Reuters forecast an increase of 0.3 percent.
Also among earnings, Dow component 3M rose after the conglomerate reported earnings that met Street expectations, driven by strong performance in its consumer, graphics and health care segments.
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Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/sp-500-closes-higher-just-below-1-500-1C8103620
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Tourism & Recreation: Extreme Sport Tourism
A recent article in Leisure Opportunities reports that Manx tourism officials are looking to diversify the economy of the Isle of Man by pushing extreme sport tourism. Director of Manxtreme.com, Simon Crellin, is working with tourism officials to push sports such as sea kayaking, mountain biking, open-water swimming and coasteering, making the most of the island?s natural resources such as mountains, coastline and mountain bike trails. The island already has a busy calendar of events, including the Sleepwell end2end mountain bike race ? a 75km cycle across the island?s natural trails and the Manx Mountain Marathon, a 31 mile fell race. As well as maximising these existing competitions, others will be organised too. This June, a triathlon is being organised to coincide with the TT races. It will include an open-water swim, the equivalent of three laps of the TT course on a bike and a full marathon. The end will be at the TT Grandstand.
Source: http://recreationsporttourism.blogspot.com/2013/01/extreme-sport-tourism.html
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Thursday, January 24, 2013
Zuckerberg To Fundraise For Gov. Christie, Republican Who Criticized His Own Party
Facebook founder and business celebrity Mark Zuckerberg will be hosting a high-profile fundraiser at his Palo Alto home for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a.k.a "The Boss." The two allegedly became political BFF's after appearing on Oprah together with Newark Mayor, Cory Booker, who received an extraordinary $100M donation from Zuckerberg to improve the city's schools. The fundraiser is especially notable since Christie has gone on some some epic rants against his own party, meaning that the fundraiser is not a clear win for the Republican establishment as a whole, which historically hasn't gotten much financial love from Silicon Valley.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/V7zabvyol7w/
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Berezovsky battles in court with ex-partner over assets
LONDON (Reuters) - Exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky's ex-partner, with whom he has two children, is pursuing him in court for a share of his assets, adding to financial pressures on him months after he lost a $6 billion dispute with rival Roman Abramovich.
A High Court judgment published late on Wednesday modified an earlier ruling granting Yelena Gorbunova's request that up to 200 million pounds ($317 million) of Berezovsky's assets be frozen, and said only those at risk could be restricted.
Berezovsky was saddled with over $100 million in legal costs when his protracted battle against Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea Football Club, ended in defeat last August.
The oligarch had tried to keep the proceedings between himself and Gorbunova confidential. Some hearings took place last week behind closed doors, but the latest judgment on the asset freeze was published on an online database after complaints from journalists.
"On the evidence, Mr Berezovsky is a man under financial pressure. It is likely that he will feel a more pressing need to satisfy creditors than satisfy Ms Gorbunova," judge George Mann wrote in his judgment.
Berezovsky, who lives in self-imposed exile in London, did not respond to a Reuters request for a comment.
In her application for the asset freeze order, Gorbunova said Berezovsky had promised that, when he sold his 25-million-pound Wentworth Park country estate, she would receive 5 million pounds from the proceeds.
Instead, when the estate near London was sold last year, the money went to his creditors and she saw none of it.
She also said Berezovsky had told her she was the owner of two French properties which he was now in the process of selling, and she was concerned she would not receive anything from those sales because he needed the money for himself.
Berezovsky's application to have the freeze on his assets lifted was heard by judge Mann in the High Court last week.
His lawyers argued that Gorbunova's application for the asset freeze had not followed the correct procedures and that the scale of the freeze was excessive.
"PRESSING NEED"
Mann's judgment that only the assets at risk, namely the French properties, should be frozen, means Berezovsky will not be able to sell them and dispose of the proceeds until his dispute with Gorbunova is resolved.
The judgment did not put a figure on the value of the properties.
Regarding the Wentworth Park sale, Mann wrote that if Gorbunova was right and "the 5-million-pound bird has already flown", then there were no funds on which any injunction could bite.
Noting the French properties were held through "obscure offshore structures", he said there was a risk Berezovsky could manipulate matters to deprive Gorbunova of what she said she was entitled to.
The judge also made reference to Berezovsky's "propensity to go so far as giving dishonest evidence in pursuit of a claim against another in the Abramovich proceedings".
This was a reference to judge Elizabeth Gloster's ruling last year in the Berezovsky-Abramovich case, when she said Berezovsky was an "unimpressive and inherently unreliable witness".
Mann stressed that he made no judgment about the substance of Gorbunova's assertions about the assets and the promises she said Berezovsky had made, or the evidence she had put forward.
"That evidence has not yet been tested, and it is to be anticipated that Mr Berezovsky will vigorously contest the claim, dispute a lot of the evidence and advance evidence of his own," the judge wrote.
($1 = 0.6313 British pounds)
(Reporting by Estelle Shirbon; Editing by Sophie Hares)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/berezovsky-battles-court-ex-partner-over-assets-200442204.html
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Scientists to resume work with lab-bred bird flu
WASHINGTON (AP) ? International scientists who last year halted controversial research with the deadly bird flu say they are resuming their work as countries adopt new rules to ensure safety.
The outcry erupted when two labs ? in the Netherlands and the U.S. ? reported they had created easier-to-spread versions of bird flu. Amid fierce debate about the oversight of such research and whether it might aid terrorists, those scientists voluntarily halted further work last January ? and more than three dozen of the world's leading flu researchers signed on as well.
On Wednesday, those scientists announced they were ending their moratorium because their pause in study worked: It gave the U.S. government and other world health authorities time to determine how they would oversee high-stakes research involving dangerous germs.
A number of countries already have issued new rules. The U.S. is finalizing its own research guidelines, a process that Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health said should be completed within several weeks.
In letters published in the journals Science and Nature this week, scientists wrote that those who meet their country's requirements have a responsibility to resume studying how the deadly bird flu might mutate to become a bigger threat to people ? maybe even the next pandemic. So far, the so-called H5N1 virus mostly spreads among poultry and other birds and rarely infects people.
"The risk exists in nature already. Not doing the research is really putting us in danger," said Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He and Ron Fouchier of Erasmus University in the Netherlands separately created the new virus strains that could spread through the air.
The controversy flared just over a year ago, when U.S. officials, prompted by the concerns of a biosecurity advisory panel, asked the two labs not to publish the results. They worried that terrorists might use the information to create a bioweapon. More broadly, scientists debated whether creating new strains of disease is a good idea, and if so, how to safeguard against laboratory accidents.
Ultimately, the flu researchers prevailed: The government decided the data didn't pose any immediate terrorism threat after all, and the two labs' work was published last summer.
Fouchier said that within weeks, he will begin new research in the Netherlands, with European funding, to explore exactly which mutations are the biggest threat. He said the work could enable scientists today to be on the lookout as bird flu continually evolves in the wild.
U.S.-funded scientists cannot resume their studies until the government's policy is finalized.
But the NIH had paid for the original research ? and it would have been approved under the soon-to-come expanded policy as well, Fauci told The Associated Press. That policy will add an extra layer of review to higher-risk research, to ensure that it is scientifically worth doing and that safety and bioterrorism concerns are fully addressed up-front, he said.
Had that policy been in place over a year ago, it could have averted the bird flu debate, Fauci said: "Our answer simply would have been, yes, we vetted it very carefully and the benefit is worth any risk. Period, case closed."
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Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Daily Chronicle | Recession, technology flail middle-class jobs
NEW YORK ? Five years after the start of the Great Recession, the toll is terrifyingly clear: Millions of middle-class jobs have been lost in developed countries the world over.
And the situation is even worse than it appears.
Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market. What?s more, these jobs aren?t just being lost to China and other developing countries, and they aren?t just factory work. Increasingly, jobs are disappearing in the service sector, home to two-thirds of all workers.
They?re being obliterated by technology.
Year after year, the software that runs computers and an array of other machines and devices becomes more sophisticated and powerful and capable of doing tasks more efficiently that humans have always done. For decades, science fiction warned of a future when we would be architects of our own obsolescence, replaced by our machines; an Associated Press analysis finds that the future has arrived.
?The jobs that are going away aren?t coming back,? says Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of ?Race Against the Machine.? ??I have never seen a period where computers demonstrated as many skills and abilities as they have over the past seven years.?
The global economy is being reshaped by machines that generate and analyze vast amounts of data; by devices such as smartphones and tablet computers that let people work just about anywhere, even when they?re on the move; by smarter, nimbler robots; and by services that let businesses rent computing power when they need it, instead of installing expensive equipment and hiring IT staffs to run it. Whole employment categories, from secretaries to travel agents, are starting to disappear.
?There?s no sector of the economy that?s going to get a pass,? says Martin Ford, who runs a software company and wrote ?The Lights in the Tunnel,? a book predicting widespread job losses. ?It?s everywhere.?
The numbers startle even labor economists. In the United States, half of the 7.5 million jobs lost during the Great Recession paid middle-class wages, ranging from $38,000 to $68,000. But only 2 percent of the 3.5 million jobs gained since the recession ended in June 2009 are midpay. Nearly 70 percent are low-paying jobs; 29 percent pay well.
In the 17 European countries that use the euro as their currency, the numbers are even worse. Almost 4.3 million low-pay jobs have been gained since mid-2009, but the loss of midpay jobs has never stopped. A total of 7.6 million disappeared from January 2008 through June.
Experts warn that this ?hollowing out? of the middle-class workforce is far from over. They predict the loss of millions more jobs as technology becomes even more sophisticated and reaches deeper into our lives. Maarten Goos, an economist at the University of Leuven in Belgium, says Europe could double its middle-class job losses.
Some occupations are beneficiaries of the march of technology, such as software engineers and app designers for smartphones and tablet computers. Overall, though, technology is eliminating far more jobs than it is creating.
To understand the impact technology is having on middle-class jobs in developed countries, the AP analyzed employment data from 20 countries; tracked changes in hiring by industry, pay and task; compared job losses and gains during recessions and expansions over the past four decades; and interviewed economists, technology experts, robot manufacturers, software developers, entrepreneurs and people in the labor force who ranged from CEOs to the unemployed.
The AP?s key findings:
?For more than three decades, technology has drastically reduced the number of jobs in manufacturing. Robots and other machines controlled by computer programs work faster and make fewer mistakes than humans. Now, that same efficiency is being unleashed in the service economy, which employs more than two-thirds of the workforce in developed countries. Technology is eliminating jobs in office buildings, retail establishments and other businesses consumers deal with every day.
?Technology is being adopted by every kind of organization that employs people. It?s replacing workers in large corporations and small businesses, established companies and start-ups. It?s being used by schools, colleges and universities; hospitals and other medical facilities; nonprofit organizations and the military.
?The most vulnerable workers are doing repetitive tasks that programmers can write software for ? an accountant checking a list of numbers, an office manager filing forms, a paralegal reviewing documents for key words to help in a case. As software becomes even more sophisticated, victims are expected to include those who juggle tasks, such as supervisors and managers ? workers who thought they were protected by a college degree.
?Thanks to technology, companies in the Standard & Poor?s 500 stock index reported one-third more profit the past year than they earned the year before the Great Recession. They?ve also expanded their businesses, but total employment, at 21.1 million, has declined by a half-million.
?Start-ups account for much of the job growth in developed economies, but software is allowing entrepreneurs to launch businesses with a third fewer employees than in the 1990s. There is less need for administrative support and back-office jobs that handle accounting, payroll and benefits.
?It?s becoming a self-serve world. Instead of relying on someone else in the workplace or our personal lives, we use technology to do tasks ourselves. Some find this frustrating; others like the feeling of control. Either way, this trend will only grow as software permeates our lives.
?Technology is replacing workers in developed countries regardless of their politics, policies and laws. Union rules and labor laws may slow the dismissal of employees, but no country is attempting to prohibit organizations from using technology that allows them to operate more efficiently ? and with fewer employees.
Some analysts reject the idea that technology has been a big job killer. They note that the collapse of the housing market in the U.S., Ireland, Spain and other countries and the ensuing global recession wiped out millions of middle-class construction and factory jobs. In their view, governments could bring many of the jobs back if they would put aside worries about their heavy debts and spend more. Others note that jobs continue to be lost to China, India and other countries in the developing world.
But to the extent technology has played a role, it raises the specter of high unemployment even after economic growth accelerates. Some economists say millions of middle-class workers must be retrained to do other jobs if they hope to get work again. Others are more hopeful. They note that technological change over the centuries eventually has created more jobs than it destroyed, though the wait can be long and painful.
A common refrain: The developed world may face years of high middle-class unemployment, social discord, divisive politics, falling living standards and dashed hopes.
In the U.S., the economic recovery that started in June 2009 has been called the third straight ?jobless recovery.?
But that?s a misnomer. The jobs came back after the first two.
Most recessions since World War II were followed by a surge in new jobs as consumers started spending again and companies hired to meet the new demand. In the months after recessions ended in 1991 and 2001, there was no familiar snap-back, but all the jobs had returned in less than three years.
But 42 months after the Great Recession ended, the U.S. has gained only 3.5 million, or 47 percent, of the 7.5 million jobs that were lost. The 17 countries that use the euro had 3.5 million fewer jobs last June than in December 2007.
This has truly been a jobless recovery, and the lack of midpay jobs is almost entirely to blame.
Fifty percent of the U.S. jobs lost were in midpay industries, but Moody?s Analytics, a research firm, says just 2 percent of the 3.5 million jobs gained are in that category. After the four previous recessions, at least 30 percent of jobs created ? and as many as 46 percent ? were in midpay industries.
Other studies that group jobs differently show a similar drop in middle-class work.
Some of the most startling studies have focused on midskill, midpay jobs that require tasks that follow well-defined procedures and are repeated throughout the day. Think travel agents, salespeople in stores, office assistants and back-office workers like benefits managers and payroll clerks, as well as machine operators and other factory jobs. An August 2012 paper by economists Henry Siu of the University of British Columbia and Nir Jaimovich of Duke University found these kinds of jobs comprise fewer than half of all jobs, yet accounted for nine of 10 of all losses in the Great Recession. And they have kept disappearing in the economic recovery.
Webb Wheel Products makes parts for truck brakes, which involves plenty of repetitive work. Its newest employee is the Doosan V550M, and it?s a marvel. It can spin a 130-pound brake drum like a child?s top, smooth its metal surface, then drill holes ? all without missing a beat. And it doesn?t take vacations or ?complain about anything,? says Dwayne Ricketts, president of the Cullman, Ala., company.
Thanks to computerized machines, Webb Wheel hasn?t added a factory worker in three years, though it?s making 300,000 more drums annually, a 25 percent increase.
?Everyone is waiting for the unemployment rate to drop, but I don?t know if it will much,? Ricketts says. ?Companies in the recession learned to be more efficient, and they?re not going to go back.?
In Europe, companies couldn?t go back even if they wanted to. The 17 countries that use the euro slipped into another recession 14 months ago, in November 2011. The current unemployment rate is a record 11.8 percent.
European companies had been using technology to replace midpay workers for years, and now that has accelerated.
?The recessions have amplified the trend,? says Goos, the Belgian economist. ?New jobs are being created, but not the middle-pay ones.?
In Canada, a 2011 study by economists at the University of British Columbia and York University in Toronto found a similar pattern of middle-class losses, though they were working with older data. In the 15 years through 2006, the share of total jobs held by many midpay, midskill occupations shrank. The share held by foremen fell 37 percent, workers in administrative and senior clerical roles fell 18 percent and those in sales and service fell 12 percent.
In Japan, a 2009 report from Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo documented a ?substantial? drop in midpay, midskill jobs in the five years through 2005, and linked it to technology.
Developing economies have been spared the technological onslaught ? for now. Countries like Brazil and China are still growing middle-class jobs because they?re shifting from export-driven to consumer-based economies. But even they are beginning to use more machines in manufacturing. The cheap labor they relied on to make goods from apparel to electronics is no longer so cheap as their living standards rise.
One example is Sunbird Engineering, a Hong Kong firm that makes mirror frames for heavy trucks at a factory in southern China. Salaries at its plant in Dongguan have nearly tripled from $80 a month in 2005 to $225 today. ?Automation is the obvious next step,? CEO Bill Pike says.
Sunbird is installing robotic arms that drill screws into a mirror assembly, work now done by hand. The machinery will allow the company to eliminate two positions on a 13-person assembly line. Pike hopes that additional automation will allow the company to reduce another five or six jobs from the line.
?By automating, we can outlive the labor cost increases inevitable in China,? Pike says. ?Those who automate in China will win the battle of increased costs.?
Foxconn Technology Group, which assembles iPhones at factories in China, unveiled plans in 2011 to install one million robots over three years.
A recent headline in the China Daily newspaper: ?Chinese robot wars set to erupt.?
Candidates for U.S. president last year never tired of telling Americans how jobs were being shipped overseas. China, with its vast army of cheaper labor and low-value currency, was easy to blame.
But most jobs cut in the U.S. and Europe weren?t moved. No one got them. They vanished. And the villain in this story ? a clever software engineer working in Silicon Valley or the high-tech hub around Heidelberg, Germany ? isn?t so easy to hate.
?It doesn?t have political appeal to say the reason we have a problem is we?re so successful in technology,? says Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University. ?There?s no enemy there.?
Unless you count family and friends and the person staring at you in the mirror. The uncomfortable truth is technology is killing jobs with the help of ordinary consumers by enabling them to quickly do tasks that workers used to do full time, for salaries.
Check out your groceries or drugstore purchases using a kiosk? A worker behind a cash register used to do that.
Buy clothes without visiting a store? You?ve taken work from a salesman.
Click ?accept? in an email invitation to attend a meeting? You?ve pushed an office assistant closer to unemployment.
Book your vacation using an online program? You?ve helped lay off a travel agent. Perhaps at American Express Co., which announced this month that it plans to cut 5,400 jobs, mainly in its travel business, as more of its customers shift to online portals to plan trips.
Software is picking out worrisome blots in medical scans, running trains without conductors, driving cars without drivers, spotting profits in stocks trades in milliseconds, analyzing Twitter traffic to tell where to sell certain snacks, sifting through documents for evidence in court cases, recording power usage beamed from digital utility meters at millions of homes, and sorting returned library books.
Technology gives rise to ?cheaper products and cool services,? says David Autor, an economist at MIT, one of the first to document tech?s role in cutting jobs. ?But if you lose your job, that is slim compensation.?
Even the most commonplace technologies ? take, say, email ? are making it tough for workers to get jobs, including ones with MBAs, like Roshanne Redmond, a former project manager at a commercial real estate developer.
?I used to get on the phone, talk to a secretary and coordinate calendars,? Redmond says. ?Now, things are done by computer.?
Technology is used by companies to run leaner and smarter in good times and bad, but never more than in bad. In a recession, sales fall and companies cut jobs to save money. Then they turn to technology to do tasks people used to do. And that?s when it hits them: They realize they don?t have to re-hire the humans when business improves, or at least not as many.
The Hackett Group, a consultant on back-office jobs, estimates 2 million of them in finance, human resources, information technology and procurement have disappeared in the U.S. and Europe since the Great Recession. It pins the blame for more than half of the losses on technology. These are jobs that used to fill cubicles at almost every company ? clerks paying bills and ordering supplies, benefits managers filing health-care forms and IT experts helping with computer crashes.
?The effect of (technology) on white-collar jobs is huge, but it?s not obvious,? says MIT?s McAfee. Companies ?don?t put out a press release saying we?re not hiring again because of machines.?
___
What hope is there for the future?
Historically, new companies and new industries have been the incubator of new jobs. Start-up companies no more than five years old are big sources of new jobs in developed economies. In the U.S., they accounted for 99 percent of new private sector jobs in 2005, according to a study by the University of Maryland?s John Haltiwanger and two other economists.
But even these companies are hiring fewer people. The average new business employed 4.7 workers when it opened its doors in 2011, down from 7.6 in the 1990s, according to a Labor Department study released last March.
Technology is probably to blame, wrote the report?s authors, Eleanor Choi and James Spletzer. Entrepreneurs no longer need people to do clerical and administrative tasks to help them get their businesses off the ground.
In the old days ? say, 10 years ago ? ?you?d need an assistant pretty early to coordinate everything ? or you?d pay a huge opportunity cost for the entrepreneur or the president to set up a meeting,? says Jeff Connally, CEO of CMIT Solutions, a technology consultancy to small businesses.
Now technology means ?you can look at your calendar and everybody else?s calendar and ? bing! ? you?ve set up a meeting.? So no assistant gets hired.
Entrepreneur Andrew Schrage started the financial advice website Money Crashers in 2009 with a partner and one freelance writer. The bare-bones start-up was only possible, Schrage says, because of technology that allowed the company to get online help with accounting and payroll and other support functions without hiring staff.
?Had I not had access to cloud computing and outsourcing, I estimate that I would have needed 5-10 employees to begin this venture,? Schrage says. ?I doubt I would have been able to launch my business.?
Technological innovations have been throwing people out of jobs for centuries. But they eventually created more work, and greater wealth, than they destroyed. Ford, the author and software engineer, thinks there is reason to believe that this time will be different. He sees virtually no end to the inroads of computers into the workplace. Eventually, he says, software will threaten the livelihoods of doctors, lawyers and other highly skilled professionals.
Many economists are encouraged by history and think the gains eventually will outweigh the losses. But even they have doubts.
?What?s different this time is that digital technologies show up in every corner of the economy,? says McAfee, a self-described ?digital optimist.? ??Your tablet (computer) is just two or three years ago, and it?s already taken over our lives.?
Peter Lindert, an economist at the University of California, Davis, says the computer is more destructive than innovations in the Industrial Revolution because the pace at which it is upending industries makes it hard for people to adapt.
Occupations that provided middle-class lifestyles for generations can disappear in a few years. Utility meter readers are just one example. As power companies began installing so-called smart readers outside homes, the number of meter readers in the U.S. plunged from 56,000 in 2001 to 36,000 in 2010, according to the Labor Department.
In 10 years? That number is expected to be zero.
NEXT: Practically human: Can smart machines do your job?
There are 38 hours, 30 minutes remaining to comment on this story.
Source: http://www.daily-chronicle.com/2013/01/22/recession-technology-flail-middle-class-jobs/a2eizbq/
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Defiant Clinton takes on lawmakers on Libya attack
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gestures as she testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2013, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the deadly September attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gestures as she testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2013, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the deadly September attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pounds her fist as she testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2013, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the deadly September attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton smiles during a lighter moment as she testifies on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2013, before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs about the deadly September attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2013, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the deadly September attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, left, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2013, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the deadly September attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered fiery rejoinders Wednesday to Republican critics of the Obama administration's handling of the deadly attack on a U.S. mission in Benghazi, facing off with lawmakers who included potential 2016 presidential rivals.
At times emotional and frequently combative, Clinton rejected GOP suggestions in two congressional hearings that the administration tried to mislead the country about the Sept. 11 attack that killed Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans. She insisted the State Department is moving swiftly and aggressively to strengthen security at diplomatic posts worldwide.
In her last formal testimony before Congress as America's top diplomat ? but perhaps not her last time on the political stage ? Clinton once again took responsibility for the department's missteps and failures leading up to the assault. But she also said that requests for more security at the diplomatic mission in Benghazi didn't reach her desk, and reminded lawmakers that they have a responsibility to fund security-related budget requests.
Three weeks after her release from a New York hospital ? admitted for complications after a concussion ? Clinton was at times defiant, complimentary and willing to chastise lawmakers during more than 5 ? hours of testimony before two separate committees. She tangled with some who could be rivals in 2016 if she decides to seek the presidency again.
Her voice cracking at one point, Clinton said the attack and the aftermath were highly personal tragedies for the families of the victims who died ? Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty ? as well as herself.
"I stood next to President Obama as the Marines carried those flag-draped caskets off the plane at Andrews. I put my arms around the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters and the wives left alone to raise their children," she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a packed hearing.
Clearly annoyed with Republican complaints about the initial explanation for the attack, she rose to the defense of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who was vilified for widely debunked claims five days after the attack that protests precipitated the raid rather than terrorism.
Clinton said, "People were trying in real time to get to the best information." And she said her own focus was on looking ahead on how to improve security rather than revisiting the talking points and Rice's comments.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., pressed her on why "we were misled that there were supposedly protests and something sprang out of that, an assault sprang out of that."
"With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans," she said, her voice rising and quivering with anger as she and Johnson spoke over each other.
"Was it because of a protest? Or was it because of guys out for a walk one night decided they would go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator."
If Johnson's comments drew an irritated response from Clinton, she notably ignored Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., when he said he would have fired her if he had been in charge and found that she had not read cables from her team in Libya asking for more security. Paul is a potential 2016 presidential candidate.
"Had I been president and found you did not read the cables from Benghazi and from Ambassador Stevens, I would have relieved you of your post," Paul said. "I think it's inexcusable."
Clinton and other officials have testified that requests for additional security did not reach her level, and a scathing independent review of the matter sharply criticized four senior State Department officials who have been relieved of their duties.
"I did not see these requests. They did not come to me. I did not approve them. I did not deny them," she said.
Later, before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Republican Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina repeatedly challenged Clinton's claim to have looked at the tragedy with "clear eyes," saying she should have personally ensured security at the mission.
He said Clinton had "let the consulate become a death trap" in denying requests for additional security and called it "malpractice."
Clinton said she could have let the review board's report remain classified and told Congress "goodbye" before leaving office. But she said, it's "not who I am. It's not what I do."
Absent from the Senate hearing was Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the man tapped to succeed Clinton, who is leaving the administration after four years. Kerry, defeated by George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election, is expected to win swift Senate approval. Clinton is to introduce him at his confirmation hearing on Thursday.
Politics play an outsized role in any appearance by Clinton, who was defeated by Barack Obama in a hard-fought battle for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. She is the subject of constant speculation about a possible bid in 2016.
A former New York senator and the wife of former President Bill Clinton, she is a polarizing figure but is ending her tenure at the State Department with high favorability ratings. A poll last month by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found 65 percent of Americans held a favorable impression of her, compared with 29 percent unfavorable.
On the panel at the Senate hearing were two possible 2016 Republican presidential candidates ? Florida's Marco Rubio and Paul, a new member of the committee ? as well as John McCain of Arizona, who was defeated by Obama in November 2008.
Clinton, 65, did little to quiet the presidential chatter earlier this month when she returned to work after her hospitalization. On the subject of retirement, she said, "I don't know if that is a word I would use, but certainly stepping off the very fast track for a little while."
In a second round of questioning on Wednesday, Clinton testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee where Republican members pressed her on why cables and other memos about security deficiencies in Benghazi seemed to be ignored.
"The dots here were connected ahead of time. The State Department saw this was coming," said Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., the chairman of the panel. "The State Department didn't act."
Clinton told senators the department is implementing the 29 recommendations of the review board and going beyond the proposals, with a special focus on high-threat posts.
"Nobody is more committed to getting this right," she said. "I am determined to leave the State Department and our country safer, stronger, and more secure."
Clinton had been due to testify in December but postponed her appearances after fainting, falling and suffering a concussion while recovering from a stomach virus that left her severely dehydrated. She was then diagnosed with a blood clot near her brain and returned to work only on Jan. 7.
She won bipartisan well-wishes on her recovery, but while Democrats were quick to praise her for accomplishments as secretary of state, Republicans then hit her with withering criticism.
"It's wonderful to see you in good health and combative as ever," said McCain.
But in the same breath, he dismissed her explanation of events, the administration's response to warnings about the deteriorating security situation in Libya and even the attention paid to Libya after rebels toppled Moammar Gadhafi. "The answers, frankly, that you've given this morning are not satisfactory to me," McCain said.
To McCain, a friend that Clinton served with in the Senate, she replied matter-of-factly: "We just have a disagreement. We have a disagreement about what did happen and when it happened with respect to explaining the sequence of events."
Some Democrats raised the point that Congress had cut funding for embassy security.
"We have to get our act together," she told the panels, chiding House GOP members for recently stripping $1 billion in security aid from the hurricane relief bill and the Senate panel for failing for years to produce a spending authorization bill.
In something of a valedictory, Clinton noted her robust itinerary in four years and her work, nearly 1 million miles and 112 countries.
"My faith in our country and our future is stronger than ever. Every time that blue and white airplane carrying the words "United States of America" touches down in some far-off capital, I feel again the honor it is to represent the world's indispensable nation. And I am confident that, with your help, we will continue to keep the United States safe, strong, and exceptional."
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., expressed incredulity that the independent review board did not interview Clinton for its extensive report. She also complained about the department's "false narrative" that four employees lost their jobs over the attack.
"There's just been a shuffling of the deck chairs," said Ros-Lehtinen.
Clinton said earlier that she was not asked to speak to the review board but would have been available. She said the four employees have been removed from their jobs and have been placed on administrative leave, but federal rules prevent the department from taking more drastic steps.
Her testimony followed more than three months of Republican charges that the Obama administration ignored signs of a deteriorating security situation and cast an act of terrorism as mere protests over an anti-Muslim video in the heat of a presidential election. U.S. officials suspect that militants linked to al-Qaida carried out the attack.
___
Associated Press writers Bradley Klapper and Andrew Miga contributed to this report.
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Forecasters: Brutal, dangerous cold grips Northeast - U.S. News
Americans from Minnesota to the East Coast will be experiencing icy cold temperatures at least until the weekend, facing threats of frostbite and dangerous driving conditions due to snow and ice. NBC's Kevin Tibbles reports.
By Ian Johnston and Andrew Mach, NBC News
A full two-thirds of the country was in the grips of a blast of cold Arctic air Wednesday with temperatures falling to some of the lowest marks in years and wind chills plummeting to dangerously low levels.
The nation?s capital is experiencing what could be its coldest stretch in almost 10 years, according to NBC Washington?s Chief Meteorologist Doug Kammerer, and brutally cold weather and snow continued to hit much of the Northeast and Great Lakes area.
In the D.C. area Wednesday morning, temperatures were between 16 and 21 degrees with single-digit wind chills, according to the National Weather Service.?
Read more from weather.com
Elsewhere in the Northeast and New England, the coldest air in two years has blanketed the area with subzero wind chills moving in, a stark contrast from the mild weather residents had been experiencing this winter.
In Maine, the arctic air mass settling over the state caused temperatures to drop nearly 75 degrees in one week ? following record highs on Monday -- the Bangor Daily News reported.
Meanwhile the National Weather Service has issued freeze warnings Wednesday for as far south as Florida.
And in the Midwest Wednesday, very cold highs ranging from 10 degrees below zero to five degrees above were forecast from North Dakota to northern Wisconsin.
Temperatures are expected to linger in the mid-20s for the rest of the week, and a moderation of temperatures wouldn?t come until early next week.
Related: Chicago fire fight hampered by ice
The bitter weather has also brought with it some ?impressive? snowfalls, according to Weather.com.
The airport in Erie, Pa., saw 16.3 inches of snow fall at the airport on Monday ? the snowiest day there since Nov. 29, 1979, and making it snowiest January day on record. Other parts of the city saw up to 24 inches.
In New York state, Oswego County got up to 18 inches of snow Sunday through Monday morning, while 19 inches fell in Pulaski in the 24 hours to 9 a.m. Tuesday and Ripley got 24.8 inches over the two days to Tuesday morning.
And parts of Michigan saw 10 inches of snow in the 48 hours ending Tuesday morning. Conditions were milder in other parts of the U.S. with temperatures expected to hit the 30s and 40s from western Nebraska to southern Kansas, and record highs are predicted in the Western U.S.
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Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Pool Fetch From a Dog's Perspective Looks Way More Fun Than Just Throwing the Ball
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