Snap quiz. When the supply of labor goes down to the demand for labor, all other things being equal do you expect the price of labor to increase, decrease, or remain the same?
Okay now read this:
U.S. labor costs in the second quarter recorded their smallest increase in 33 years amid tepid gains in the private sector, but it likely was a temporary setback against the backdrop of diminishing labor market slack.
The unexpectedly smaller rise reported by the Labor Department on Friday will probably not dampen speculation that the Federal Reserve is set to raise interest rates later this year. The U.S. labor market is fast approaching full employment.
The Employment Cost Index, the broadest measure of labor costs, edged up 0.2 percent, the Labor Department said. That was the smallest gain since the series started in the second quarter of 1982 and followed a 0.7 percent rise in the first quarter.
“This data has periodically proved to be very lumpy and the sharp deceleration is inconsistent with other measures of wage inflation that are trending higher, not falling off a cliff,” said Eric Green, chief economist at TD Securities in New York.
Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the employment cost index, which is widely viewed by policymakers and economists as one of the better measures of labor market slack, rising 0.6 percent in the second quarter.
Maybe the notion that we are approaching full employment is a completely politically fabricated crock of shit.
Just sayin.
Wages stagnating, you say? Isn’t that a problem for little people?
For the life of me I don’t know why you are writing about the economy and health care costs and such trivia.
Don’t you know there is a dead lion?
Note that the population continues to rise.
My immediate reaction was that I wanted to be set down in any North American wilderness area within a half mile of that dentist, giving neither of us anything but the clothes on our backs. I’d notify the authorities where they could locate him and render medical assistance. There’s no commandment against whaling the tar out of someone who’s in desperate need of it.
However, that having been said it’s a tempest in a teapot.
I don’t know about you guys. I’m diverting my attention with birdies and bogeys. But just reviewing news stories daily, I can’t remember a time when this country was so thoroughly AFU. Jimmy Carter comes to mind. And yet the press, being the lapdogs they are, and totally insulated from the real world of Average Joe, would have you believe all is well.
It’s amazing.
BTW Dave.
As I understand it, the dentist made an honest mistake about the lions status. You can put what I know about Africa in a thimble. But I have recently befriended a couple – wife from S Africa, he from Zambia – they have absolutely fascinating stories to tell. Lions eating the locals and such, among many others. Our press have lost their freakin minds. This is political correctness in its most absurd form.
I think about trophy hunting as Oscar Wilde said about English country gentlemen and foxhunting: the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
Hunting to eat is one thing. Hunting for the joy of killing? Not so much.
Hunting for the joy of killing? Not so much.
If I didn’t know you weren’t a cat owner before, I would now. Cats will hunt simply for the pleasure of it, which is why I make sure I’ve got a few strays around my house. (Females spayed, of course.) They bring me dead rats when I’ve been nice enough to them.
For that matter, a good number of dogs seem to enjoy hunting simply for the pleasure of the kill. But I imagine you have never let yours run loose like that.
Speaking of dogs, my one-time problem neighbor (before they were foreclosed upon and evicted) is once again the problem of the state. Been doing jail time since getting arrested in early June for a variety of offenses, including DUI (repeat offender), driving with a suspended license (repeat offender), doing both of the above with a minor in the car, and for violating several different probation orders (repeat offender). When everything finishes processing I’ll be curious to see if he goes to prison (which should have been a mandatory five years w/o eligibility for paraole the last TWO times) or gets released again. He’s been arrested something like 20 times for violent offenses just in Orange County, I know of multiple arrests in at least two more nearby counties, and keeps getting turned loose. Being around cases like this makes one laugh at the idea that (a) the US is tough on crime and (b) the US incarcerates too many people. If we really incarcerated too many people, one would expect that places like Pine Hills & Chicago would be a good deal safer than they are.
A former neighbor of mine was a hunter. I’ve referenced him before. He was a trophy hunter, with animal heads adorning the walls of his living room. It grossed me out. While I can rationalize killing some animals for food, I see little benefit or merit in killing anything for the sake and glory of killing, which, IMO was the intent surrounding the over-sensationalized bagging of Cecil the Lion.
I also find it incongruent how the shock and horror, regarding the ways and means of killing Cecil, appears to have overshadowed the shock and horror of Planned Parenthood physicians in visually showing the impersonal termination of late term babies, followed by them haggling over selling their viable organs. Why one is viewed by the liberally-minded to be grotesques and inhumane, while the other is explained away as legal protocol for woman’s reproductive rights and/or contributing to medical science is mind-boggling to me.
One of our bitches, Tally, was a huntress. It has been my experience that bitches are more likely to hunt than dogs. Whenever a new litter of baby bunnies was in the garden it wouldn’t be long before Tally brought them to us, one by one, generally alive. Clearly, there’s some sort of instinct involved but it wasn’t nearly so clear what the instinct was.
My parents had a cat that would bring them live, full-grown rabbits. Dad would yell at her and then she’d snap their necks. Mom realized that the yelling was the point at which the kill happened, when the cat tensed up. That was before my time, though.
The neighbor claimed it was the bitch that egged the others on, in that case. That was probably true, but I never understood how that was supposed to mitigate the fact that the dogs were trying to kill me and others.
I take a dim view of that as well. On the other hand I find it perversely pleasing that sociopaths have become productive members of society by practicing medicine. It seems like a good choice for their particular set of characteristics.
I am not by any means claiming that all physicians are sociopaths, merely that some apparently are.
Was this a trophy hunting deal? Honest question. I don’t know.
As for cats. Have had cats all my life, from earliest memories. They kill for sport. Will bring you birds and mice as presents. “Now pet me.”
“The trophy-hunter is the caveman reborn. Trophy-hunting is the prerogative of youth . . . and nothing to apologize for.
“The disquieting thing in the modern picture is the trophy-hunter who never grew up, in whom the capacity for isolation, perception, and husbandry is undeveloped, or perhaps lost. He is the motorized ant who swarms the continents before learning to see his own back yard, who consumes but never creates outdoor satisfactions.”
–Aldo Leopold, from “Sand County Almanac”