Future jobs: More skills or less pay
Whenever companies start hiring freely again, job-seekers with specialized skills and education will have plenty of good opportunities. Others will face a choice: Take a job with low pay - or none at all.

Job creation likely will remain weak for months or even years. But once employers do step up hiring, some economists expect job openings to fall mainly into two categories of roughly equal numbers:

* Professional fields with higher pay. Think lawyers, research scientists and software engineers.

* Lower-skill and lower-paying jobs, such as home health-care aides and store clerks.

Those in between? Their outlook is bleaker. Economists foresee fewer moderately paid factory supervisors, postal workers and office administrators.

That's the sobering message American workers face as they celebrate Labor Day at a time of high unemployment, scant hiring and a widespread loss of job security. Not until 2014 or later is the nation expected to have regained all, or nearly all, the 8.4 million jobs lost to the recession. Millions of lost jobs in real estate, for example, aren't likely to be restored this decade, if ever.

On Friday, the government said the August unemployment rate ticked up to 9.6 percent. Not enough jobs were created to absorb the growing number of people seeking work. The unemployment rate has exceeded 9 percent for 16 months, the longest such stretch in nearly 30 years...

...The service sector's growth also could magnify the nation's income inequality, with more people either affluent or financially squeezed. The nation isn't educating enough people for the higher-skilled service-sector jobs of the future, economists warn.

"There will be jobs," said Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist. "The big question is what they are going to pay, and what kind of lives they will allow people to lead. This will be a big issue for how broad a middle class we are going to have."...

Source: Seattle Times

...were it not for the stimulus programs put in place by the Obama Administration, we would have had armies of hobos wandering the country looking for food and work—and that is coming next.

The American middle class is done, an historical oddity, now despised by the GOP for wanting a slice of the pie. This is the direct result of automation, digitalization and unfettered globalization, which only benefits CEOs, majority stockholders, hedge fund managers, lawyers and big-ticket consumers. We are killing the middle class in order to enrich a favored few...

Some Newspapers, Tracking Readers Online, Shift
In most businesses, not knowing how well a particular product is performing would be almost unthinkable. But newspapers have always been a peculiar business, one that has stubbornly, proudly clung to a sense that focusing too much on the bottom line can lead nowhere good.

Now, because of technology that can pinpoint what people online are viewing and commenting on, how much time they spend with an article and even how much money an article makes in advertising revenue, newspapers can make more scientific decisions about allocating their ever scarcer resources.

Such data has never been available with such specificity and timeliness. The reader surveys that newspapers relied on for decades took months to produce, often leaving editors with stale data...

...At The Washington Post, a television screen with an array of data - the number of unique visitors to washingtonpost.com, how many articles those visitors view and where on the Web those visitors came from - is on display for the entire newsroom. A red or green marker designates each data point, indicating whether the Web site’s goal for the month on that particular metric has been met. About 120 people in The Post’s newsroom get an e-mail each day laying out how the Web site performed in the closely watched metrics - 46 in all...

Source: NY Times

...a web-based hyper-local coverage service of Chattanooga woud eat their lunch. It's only a matter of time...

Housing Woes Bring New Cry: Let Market Fall
The unexpectedly deep plunge in home sales this summer is likely to force the Obama administration to choose between future homeowners and current ones, a predicament officials had been eager to avoid.

Over the last 18 months, the administration has rolled out just about every program it could think of to prop up the ailing housing market, using tax credits, mortgage modification programs, low interest rates, government-backed loans and other assistance intended to keep values up and delinquent borrowers out of foreclosure. The goal was to stabilize the market until a resurgent economy created new households that demanded places to live.

As the economy again sputters and potential buyers flee - July housing sales sank 26 percent from July 2009 - there is a growing sense of exhaustion with government intervention. Some economists and analysts are now urging a dose of shock therapy that would greatly shift the benefits to future homeowners: Let the housing market crash.

When prices are lower, these experts argue, buyers will pour in, creating the elusive stability the government has spent billions upon billions trying to achieve...

Source: NY Times

...happy Labor Day. You ain't seen nothing, yet...

Ex-HP CEO Mark Hurd In Talks With Oracle, Where You Can Have Personal Relationships With Whoever You Want
As expected, the former CEO of HP, Mark Hurd, is now in talks with Oracle about joining the company, Ben Worthen and others at the Wall Street Journal report.
Mark was sacked from HP last month after HP party schmoozer Jodie Fisher sued him for sexual harassment.

Mark's friend and tennis opponent Larry Ellison immediately rushed to his aid, calling HP's board decision the dumbest since Apple's board canned Steve Jobs.

Oracle is no stranger to sexcapades. Oracle president Chuck Phillips, a former Morgan Stanley analyst, had the pleasure of watching a girlfriend buy a billboard in Times Square to try to win him back. And Larry himself, a famous bachelor, was the target of a sexual harassment lawsuit that ended in his accuser going to jail for a year for falsely accusing him.

The one hitch here is that Larry has been CEO of Oracle for life. So whatever role Mark Hurd is considering presumably won't carry that title...

Source: The Business Insider

...it's not mandatory, see, merely encouraged...

Nevada candidate touts speedy fix to budget crisis
CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) - One Nevada gubernatorial hopeful sees a speedy fix to Nevada's budget crisis. Nonpartisan candidate Eugene "Gino" DiSimone believes people would pay for the privilege to drive up to 90 mph on designated highways—and fill the state's depleted coffers.

DiSimone calls his idea the "free limit plan." He estimates the plan would bring in $1 billion a year.

First, vehicles would have to pass a safety inspection. Then vehicle information would be loaded into a database, and motorists would purchase a transponder.

After setting up an account, anyone in a hurry could dial in, and for $25 charged to a credit card, be free to speed for 24 hours...

Source: Breitbart

...sigh...

Untangling the social web
TELECOMS operators naturally prize mobile-phone subscribers who spend a lot, but some thriftier customers, it turns out, are actually more valuable. Known as "influencers", these subscribers frequently persuade their friends, family and colleagues to follow them when they switch to a rival operator. The trick, then, is to identify such trendsetting subscribers and keep them on board with special discounts and promotions. People at the top of the office or social pecking order often receive quick callbacks, do not worry about calling other people late at night and tend to get more calls at times when social events are most often organised, such as Friday afternoons. Influential customers also reveal their clout by making long calls, while the calls they receive are generally short.

Companies can spot these influencers, and work out all sorts of other things about their customers, by crunching vast quantities of calling data with sophisticated "network analysis" software. Instead of looking at the call records of a single customer at a time, it looks at customers within the context of their social network. The ability to retain customers is particularly important in hyper-competitive markets, such as India. Bharti Airtel, India's biggest mobile operator, which handles over 3 billion calls a day, has greatly reduced customer defections by deploying the software, says Amrita Gangotra, the firm's director for information technology.

The market for such software is booming. By one estimate there are more than 100 programs for network analysis, also known as link analysis or predictive analysis. The raw data used may extend far beyond phone records to encompass information available from private and governmental entities, and internet sources such as Facebook. IBM, the supplier of the system used by Bharti Airtel, says its annual sales of such software, now growing at double-digit rates, will exceed $15 billion by 2015. In the past five years IBM has spent more than $11 billion buying makers of network-analysis software. Gartner, a market-research firm, ranks the technology at number two in its list of strategic business operations meriting significant investment this year...

Source: The Economist

...nobody will be able to resist abusing this...

Greatest of All Time
Last fall, Forbes magazine was all atwitter as Tiger Woods closed in on becoming "the first athlete to earn over $1 billion" in the course of his career. Presumably his fortunes will now start to droop, but Forbes missed the mark—taking the long view, Tiger was never all that well paid to begin with when compared with the charioteers of ancient Rome...

...The best drivers were made legends by poets who sung their exploits and graffiti artists who scrawled crude renderings of their faces on walls around the Mediterranean. They could also be made extraordinarily wealthy.

The very best paid of these—in fact, the best paid athlete of all time—was a Lusitanian Spaniard named Gaius Appuleius Diocles, who had short stints with the Whites and Greens, before settling in for a long career with the Reds. Twenty-four years of winnings brought Diocles—likely an illiterate man whose signature move was the strong final dash—the staggering sum of 35,863,120 sesterces in prize money. The figure is recorded in a monumental inscription erected in Rome by his fellow charioteers and admirers in 146, which hails him fulsomely on his retirement at the age of "42 years, 7 months, and 23 days" as "champion of all charioteers."

His total take home amounted to five times the earnings of the highest paid provincial governors over a similar period—enough to provide grain for the entire city of Rome for one year, or to pay all the ordinary soldiers of the Roman Army at the height of its imperial reach for a fifth of a year. By today's standards that last figure, assuming the apt comparison is what it takes to pay the wages of the American armed forces for the same period, would cash out to about $15 billion. Even without his dalliances, it is doubtful Tiger could have matched it...

Source: Lapham's Quaterly

...and yet, with a few minor exceptions that come and go, sports means nothing to me. I rather suspect that one's interest in sports is correlated with how boring and soul-destroying your marriage or employment is...

The Boss Is Robotic, and Rolling Up Behind You
SACRAMENTO - Dr. Alan Shatzel's pager beeped at 9 on a Saturday morning. A man had suffered a stroke, and someone had to decide, quickly, whether to give him an anticlotting drug that could mean the difference between life and death.

Dr. Shatzel, a neurologist, hustled not to the emergency room where the patient lay - 260 miles away, in Bakersfield - but to a darkened room at a hospital here. He took a seat in front of the latest tools of his trade: computer monitors, a keyboard and a joystick that control his assistant on the scene - a robot on wheels.

He guided the roughly five-foot-tall machine, which has a large monitor as its "head," into the patient's room in Bakersfield. Dr. Shatzel's face appeared on screen, and his voice issued from a speaker.

Dr. Shatzel acknowledged the nurse and introduced himself to the patient's grandson, explaining that he would question the patient to determine whether he was a candidate for the drug. The robot's stereophonic hearing conveyed the answers. Using the hypersensitive camera on the monitor, Dr. Shatzel zoomed in and out and swung the display left and right, much as if he were turning his head to look around the room.

For years, the military and law enforcement agencies have used specialized robots to disarm bombs and carry out other dangerous missions. This summer, such systems helped seal a BP well a mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Now, with rapidly falling costs, the next frontiers are the office, the hospital and the home.

Mobile robots are now being used in hundreds of hospitals nationwide as the eyes, ears and voices of doctors who cannot be there in person. They are being rolled out in workplaces, allowing employees in disparate locales to communicate more easily and letting managers supervise employees from afar. And they are being tested as caregivers in assisted-living centers...

Source: NY Times

...that would be a fruitful area of concentration for your kiddies...

The Simpsons and Grad Students

...hustle, you...