U Not Gonna Like This

Okay. I'm going to change the template now. If you see the site disappear or any error messages it means I'm in the process of trying to update the site. Hopefully it will work correctly after I'm done.

Sobering stats from Numbers USA:

Background: Some Americans and lawmakers make the common error to think that unemployment figures measure people without jobs. Rather, they measure only those people who are actively looking for jobs and have signed up with government unemployment agencies. The potential labor pool is far larger than the government reports because so many people are not in the labor market at all for the following reasons:

they were laid off and ran out of unemployment benefits;

they stopped work because of illness, injury, pregnancy and they didn't have enough incentive to look for a job or the jobs weren't attractive enough;

they failed to find a job for so long that they gave up; or

they are disabled (the vast majority of disabled American cannot get a job)


also on the sidebar of this page are the following stats:

14 million Americans are unable to find full-time jobs in the current economy. —

There are 55,436,000 million Americans, ages 16-64, who are not in the labor force.
— U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey; July, 2007 BLS

Forty percent of working-age African-American men are unemployed.
— BLS

Mind you these are just the numbers from the people that bother to register with the feds. (So it's much higher than that.)

and just a bit more from the bottom of the page:

There is some direct evidence that immigration has harmed less-educated natives; states with the largest increase in immigrants also saw larger declines in natives working; and in occupational categories that received the most new immigrants, native unemployment averages 10 percent.

Some of the occupations most impacted by immigration include maids, construction laborers, dishwashers, janitors, painters, cabbies, grounds keepers, and meat/poultry workers. The overwhelming majority of workers in these occupations are native-born.

It's a damn shame but yet it will continue as long as people keep putting the same clowns in office year after year..

Soon I will be doing a little updating of the web log and house cleaning but not
of the post. Those will stay. Until tomorrow night..

This post from the archives of Pooks Mill:

Here is a fantastic article Newsweek did on the 'marriage crunch' way back in 1986. The article is full of great quotes and really reveals how some women think (such as one women deciding to buy a house instead of getting a husband to do it. So that is the purpose of husbands is to turn them into a house?). It also shows many women's panic over this article back then.


And on the MSNBC Site:

It was Valentine's Day when Sharon Makover learned of it on the news, and the irony did not elude her. "I thought, 'This is not what I want to be hearing today"." Having recently split up with one boyfriend, Makover was at a crossroads: should she throw herself into her career or commit to a new boyfriend living in another country? "It got me thinking about what I wanted to do with my life," says Makover, 26, a curatorial assistant at the Jewish Museum in New York. A month later she was engaged.

All things being equal, Los Angeles screenwriter Nancy Rigg would prefer having a husband. Nevertheless, the news infuriated her. "It reinforces an old myth that once you hit 30, you're over the hill," says Rigg, 36. "I imagine that women who are buying into this are pretty depressed right now. It was like Moses came down the mountain and said, 'Boo on you women"."