Tag Archives: jobs

Make, Think, Imagine: Engineering the Future of Civilization – John Browne

by Myrna Posted on August 30, 2019

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Make, Think, Imagine: Engineering the Future of Civilization

John Browne

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $14.99

Publish Date: August 28, 2019

Publisher: Pegasus Books

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


An impassioned defense of progress and innovation—and an argument for social responsibility from engineer, businessman, and former CEO of BP Lord John Browne. Today's unprecedented pace of change leaves many people wondering what new technologies are doing to our lives. Has social media robbed us of our privacy and fed us with false information? Are the decisions about our health, security and finances made by computer programs inexplicable and biased? Will these algorithms become so complex that we can no longer control them? Are robots going to take our jobs? Will better health care lead to an aging population which cannot be cared for? Can we provide housing for our ever-growing urban populations? And has our demand for energy driven the Earth's climate to the edge of catastrophe?             John Browne argues that we need not and must not put the brakes on technological advance. Civilization is founded on engineering innovation; all progress stems from the human urge to make things and to shape the world around us, resulting in greater freedom, health and wealth for all. Drawing on history, his own experiences and conversations with many of today's great innovators, he uncovers the basis for all progress and its consequences, both good and bad. He argues compellingly that the same spark that triggers each innovation can be used to counter its negative consequences. Make, Think, Imagine provides an eloquent blueprint for how we can keep moving towards a brighter future.

Link – 

Make, Think, Imagine: Engineering the Future of Civilization – John Browne

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A Czech nuclear plant staged a bikini contest to hire its next intern.

by PenelopeODonnell Posted on June 27, 2017

The new Museum of Capitalism in Oakland, California, explores “the ideology, history, and legacy of capitalism.” Surprise! One of the most detrimental legacies of capitalism is … climate change.

Bear with us (and the museum’s curators): The fossil fuel production that drives climate change is due to global (read: American) desire for profit and growth.

The museum — funded largely through a grant from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation — exhibits several works examining how humans despoil the environment in our quest for more things. Some are simple, like a bright blue baseball cap emblazoned with “COAL = JOBS” in white, akin to the ubiquitous MAGA accessory.

“American Domain,” an exhibit curated by Erin Elder (below), explores the ways in which land in the U.S. has been “continually staked and claimed.” Photographs of the Mexican-American border hang alongside images of drilling equipment, suggesting inconsistency in the United States’ attitude toward borders when it comes to fossil fuel access versus immigration.

“American Domain”Brea McAnally/Brea Photography

In another section of the museum, a video by Kota Takeuchi shows a worker undertaking cleanup of the Fukushima disaster. The worker slowly points at the audience through the camera lens, a designation of blame lasting over 20 minutes.

It’s a succinct gesture that gets to the point of the whole museum: We’re all complicit.

Taken from – 

A Czech nuclear plant staged a bikini contest to hire its next intern.

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A top scientist ‘felt bullied’ to downplay facts by EPA chief of staff.

by IDSMoisesjfofrr Posted on June 27, 2017

The new Museum of Capitalism in Oakland, California, explores “the ideology, history, and legacy of capitalism.” Surprise! One of the most detrimental legacies of capitalism is … climate change.

Bear with us (and the museum’s curators): The fossil fuel production that drives climate change is due to global (read: American) desire for profit and growth.

The museum — funded largely through a grant from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation — exhibits several works examining how humans despoil the environment in our quest for more things. Some are simple, like a bright blue baseball cap emblazoned with “COAL = JOBS” in white, akin to the ubiquitous MAGA accessory.

“American Domain,” an exhibit curated by Erin Elder (below), explores the ways in which land in the U.S. has been “continually staked and claimed.” Photographs of the Mexican-American border hang alongside images of drilling equipment, suggesting inconsistency in the United States’ attitude toward borders when it comes to fossil fuel access versus immigration.

“American Domain”Brea McAnally/Brea Photography

In another section of the museum, a video by Kota Takeuchi shows a worker undertaking cleanup of the Fukushima disaster. The worker slowly points at the audience through the camera lens, a designation of blame lasting over 20 minutes.

It’s a succinct gesture that gets to the point of the whole museum: We’re all complicit.

See the original article here – 

A top scientist ‘felt bullied’ to downplay facts by EPA chief of staff.

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It’s the Wall Wot Won It

by MaximoArispe Posted on April 17, 2017

Mother Jones

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Phil Klinkner takes to the pages of the LA Times this morning to tell us that immigration was a big deal in the 2016 election:

Comparing the results of the 2012 and 2016 ANES surveys shows that Trump increased his vote over Mitt Romney’s on a number of immigration-related issues. In 2012 and 2016, the ANES asked respondents their feelings toward immigrants in the country illegally. Respondents could rate them anywhere between 100 (most positive) or 0 (most negative). Among those with positive views (above 50), there was no change between 2012 and 2016, with Romney and Trump each receiving 22% of the vote. Among those who had negative views, however, Trump did better than Romney, capturing 60% of the vote compared with only 55% for Romney.

….Overall, immigration represented one of the biggest divides between Trump and Clinton voters. Among Trump voters, 67% endorsed building a southern border wall and 47% of them favored it a great deal. In contrast, 77% of Clinton voters opposed building a wall and 67 % strongly opposed it.

This gibes with my anecdotal view that a fair number of Trump voters didn’t pay much attention to anything he said except that he was going to build a wall and keep the Mexicans out. All the budget and regulation and Obamacare and climate change stuff was just noise that they didn’t take very seriously. But building a wall was nice and simple, and they thought it would bring back their jobs and keep their towns safe.

Having said that, though, I want to repeat a warning: everyone should stop looking for tectonic changes that account for Trump’s win. Hillary Clinton was running for a third Democratic term during OK-but-not-great economic times, and that’s always difficult. Most of the fundamentals-based models predicted she’d win by a couple of percentage points, and she actually did much better than that—until James Comey decided to destroy her. And even at that, she did win by a couple of percentage points. It was a fluke of the Electoral College that put Trump in the White House, not a historic shift in voting patterns.

The real question is how Trump won the Republican primary. At the presidential level, that’s a far more interesting topic than what happened in a fairly ordinary general election.

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It’s the Wall Wot Won It

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Quote of the Day: Donald Trump Saves the Coal Mines

by Scotty90Rx Posted on February 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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Via the Washington Post:

“If he hadn’t gotten into office, 70,000 miners would have been put out of work,” Patricia Nana, a 42-year-old naturalized citizen from Cameroon. “I saw the ceremony where he signed that bill, giving them their jobs back, and he had miners with their hard hats and everything — you could see how happy they were.”

And those immigration raids last weeks ended up deporting 1.3 million undocumented workers. And Intel’s new factory will give good, high-paying jobs to 250,000 hardworking Americans. And Trump’s Muslim ban prevented 400 acts of terror on American soil.

Sigh. Among his supporters, Trump’s style of governance by TV spectacle is working out well.

Link:  

Quote of the Day: Donald Trump Saves the Coal Mines

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No, All the New Jobs Have Not Passed Whites By

by LatanyaScheffle Posted on December 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over at the New York Times today, Eduardo Porter takes on the notion that working-class whites ignore their economic interests and vote for Republicans because of social issues like abortion and guns:

This view fits a common narrative among liberal analysts of American politics….But it largely misses the mark….There are almost nine million more jobs than there were at the previous peak in November 2007, just before the economy tumbled into recession. But the gains have not been evenly distributed.

Despite accounting for less than 15 percent of the labor force, Hispanics got more than half of the net additional jobs. Blacks and Asians also gained millions more jobs than they lost. But whites, who account for 78 percent of the labor force, lost more than 700,000 net jobs over the nine years.

This is very badly misleading. Let’s plow our way through a fistful of charts to get at the truth. First up, here’s the employment level:

Porter is right: if you look at the raw number of jobs, blacks and Hispanics have gotten most of them. Whites are at about the same level as they were in 2007. How can this be? That’s easy: it’s because the white population is at about the same level as it was in 2007

Whites have the same number of jobs as in 2007 because there are the same number of whites as in 2007. Hispanics and blacks have more jobs because there are more Hispanics and blacks. This means nothing. What you’d like to know is what percentage of each group is employed:

These numbers rattle around a bit. Whites did better in 2010-13 while blacks and Hispanics have done better in 2014-16. At this point they’re all within a few points of each other. Now put all this together and you get the unemployment rate:

All three groups are at nearly the exact same level as they were in 2007, which means that all the new jobs have been shared out equally by population. Whites have done about as well as anyone else, and since whites started out ahead, it means they’re still ahead. Here’s the unemployment rate today, which is nearly identical to the rate in 2007:

Whites: 4.2 percent
Hispanics: 5.7 percent
Blacks: 8.1 percent

If you take a look at this stuff without accounting for population growth you’ll be badly misled. When it comes to jobs, whites had it better than blacks and Hispanics in 2007 and they still do today by about the same amount. They haven’t been screwed by the job market any more than anyone else, and they haven’t gained or lost ground. After ten years with a huge recession in between, we’re all back where we started.

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No, All the New Jobs Have Not Passed Whites By

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Support for Trump Is Strongest Where Illegal Immigration Is Lowest

by RobinDjt304 Posted on November 14, 2016

Mother Jones

Here’s a chart for you:

What this shows is that states with the smallest population of illegal immigrants had the strongest vote for Donald Trump. It’s not an especially strong correlation, and I wouldn’t draw any grand conclusions from it, but it sure doesn’t seem to suggest that actual loss of jobs to illegal immigrants is what drives support for Trump and his wall. If anything, it’s just the opposite.

State-level popular vote data here. Immigration data here.

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Support for Trump Is Strongest Where Illegal Immigration Is Lowest

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The Seattle Minimum Wage Experiment: Mixed Results So Far

by DamianPinner892 Posted on July 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’ve mentioned before—only half jokingly—that I’m happy to see other people experiment with a $15 minimum wage. It’s the best of all worlds: it provides us with test beds to see what happens, but if it’s a disaster it won’t affect me personally.

Seattle was one of the first to do this, and as a first step they raised their minimum wage to $11 about 18 months ago. It’s probably still too early to draw any sweeping conclusions about what happened, but we do have some preliminary results from the Seattle Minimum Wage Study Team at the University of Washington. Their basic methodology is to compare Seattle with surrounding regions (plus a composite “Synthetic Seattle”) to see how it compares. So what have they found so far?

Wages up. For starters, they spend a surprising number of pages confirming that, yes, wages went up. Apparently Seattle employers are complying with the law. However, the Seattle economy has been booming recently, so it’s hard to know how much of the increase is due to the minimum wage law and how much would have happened anyway thanks to the tight job market. They conclude that the law was responsible for an average hourly increase of 73 cents among workers who were previously making less than $11.
No impact on availability of jobs. But what about jobs? Did the number of low-wage jobs go down? Yes it did—but less than in areas that didn’t increase their minimum wage: “The half-percentage-point reduction in persistent jobs at these businesses between mid-2014 and late-2015 is actually a positive development, as these businesses contracted more slowly than usual in the historical record. We find the exact same pattern in Synthetic Seattle, suggesting that the minimum wage had little or no net impact on the number of persistent jobs.”
Hours worked decreased. How about hours worked? Did low-wage employers reduce their hours? Yes: “We estimate that hours per employee declined between 7.5 and 9.9 over a quarter, or 35-40 minutes per week.”
Employment decreased. How about employment of low-wage workers? Unsurprisingly, it went down: “While these low-wage workers increased their likelihood of being employed relative to prior years, this increase was less than in comparison regions. We estimate that the impact of the Ordinance was a 1.1 percentage point decrease in likelihood of low-wage Seattle workers remaining employed.”
No effect on business closures. Did more establishments go out of business? Not really. It was a wash: “For single-location establishments that paid more than 40% of the workers less than $15 per hour at baseline, we find a slightly larger negative impact of 1.0 percentage points. Yet, this modest increase in business closure rates was more than offset by an increase in the rate of business openings….The net effect is an estimated 0.9 percentage point increase in business openings as a result of the Minimum Wage Ordinance. This increase in both business closures and business openings perhaps should not come as a surprise. A higher minimum wage changes the type of business that can succeed profitably in Seattle, and we should thus expect some extra churning.”

Bottom line: wages went up, but employment went down. This is about what you’d expect. However, I’m a little unclear on how to reconcile this employment decrease with the finding that the number of persistent jobs didn’t change. Perhaps there was a decrease in seasonal or intermittent jobs? It will probably all become clearer in future reports.

Needless to say, the real test will come over the next few years, as the minimum wage climbs to $15.

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The Seattle Minimum Wage Experiment: Mixed Results So Far

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Even With a Teleprompter, Donald Trump Is Full of Shit

by AbigailCalderone Posted on June 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Professor Trump delivered a lecture on the evils of international trade today. Here’s a snippet:

Massive trade deficits subtract directly from our Gross Domestic Product. From 1947 to 2001 — a span of over five decades — our inflation-adjusted gross domestic product grew at a rate of 3.5%. However, since 2002 — the year after we fully opened our markets to Chinese imports — that GDP growth rate has been cut almost in half.

What does this mean for Americans? For every one percent of GDP growth we fail to generate in any given year, we also fail to create over one million jobs. America’s “job creation deficit” due to slower growth since 2002 is well over 20 million jobs — and that’s just about the number of jobs our country needs right now to put America back to work at decent wages.

There are two interesting things about this. First, Trump was reading off a teleprompter, and you can tell. The real Donald Trump would have ranted about the real unemployment rate being 40 percent and 50 million people being out of work or something. Who knows? But the carefully handled Donald Trump produces a well-modulated stream of numbers that actually sounds plausible.

And yet—even with someone else carefully vetting the numbers, they still don’t come close to making sense. Consider: the U6 unemployment rate right now is 9.7 percent. This represents every single human being in the country who wants a job but can’t get one, or who wants a full-time job but can only get part-time work. Even if they’re discouraged and not currently looking for work, they’re counted.

The U6 series only goes back to 1994, but a good guess is that the lowest it’s been in all of postwar history is about 6.5 percent. We’d hit that mark if 5 million more people were working. If you do the calculation based on the current output gap instead of the U6 rate, you come up with roughly the same number.

In other words, 5 million is the absolute max, even in theory. If that many more people had jobs, the economy would be roaring along at a 1960s boom level. So where does 20 million come from? If it were just Trump blathering away, the question wouldn’t be worth asking. But this supposedly came from someone who actually thought about these numbers. And they’re still off by a factor of at least four. I sure hope Trump doesn’t run his business with financial estimates like this.

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Even With a Teleprompter, Donald Trump Is Full of Shit

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Donald Trump’s Yooge Flip-Flop on Outsourcing

by LizetteSymon Posted on March 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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On the night of his big Super Tuesday victory, GOP front-runner Donald Trump gave a winner’s press conference and, as he often does, railed against the evils of outsourcing.

“You look at countries like Mexico, where they’re killing us on the border, absolutely destroying us on the border. They’re destroying us in terms of economic development. Companies like Carrier air conditioner just moving into Mexico, Ford moving into Mexico, Nabisco closing up shop in Chicago and moving into Mexico,” Trump said to supporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. “We have to stop it, folks. I know how to stop it: We’re going to create jobs, we’re going to create jobs like you’ve never seen.”

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Donald Trump’s Yooge Flip-Flop on Outsourcing

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