Job Cuts Tame; Market Spike Up?

This is one of those slow-motion roll-outs that happens every month:  The latest job numbers come in three ways:  ADP has a job creation report.  Out yesterday and up.  Meantime, Challenger job cuts is just out and reads like this:

“The nation’s employers announced plans to cut 35,369 jobs in February, down 20 percent from the 44,653 cuts announced in January, according to a report released Thursday by global outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. Last month’s total is 4.3 percent lower than the 36,957 announced job cuts in February 2017. So far this year, employers have announced 80,022 cuts, 3.5 percent lower than through February last year. This is the lowest number of announced job cuts between January and February since 1995, when 69,907 cuts were announced.

And tomorrow about this time, we will be inspecting the detail-level of the job report from the Labor Department.

(Continues below)

All of which will be interesting, but it’s only in the longer-term data that we see whole sectors of the economy dying.

In Peoplenomics Wednesday, I went over some of the data supporting the idea that traditional “information industry” sectors are dead and dying.

No doubt, you have already seen the death of locally-originated radio programming – save the occasional widely syndicated morning show and of course the Hannity and Rush programs. Local broadcasting is mainly a joke.

But, it goes deeper than this:  Ratio and Television is dying a slow death because of technology.  Local ad sales have become a smaller piece of the electronic pie – Facebook is light, nimble, and focused compared to the waste that goes with high-priced local television ads.

Which, itself, is under attack from streaming services.

Just because we’re out in the Outback doesn’t mean isolation: We still check the New York Times (for their bashing, as much as anything) and television hasn’t shown a commercial since we went “all streaming” 8-years ago.

A series, like The Blacklist, comes in usually at about $34 bucks.  Each episode runs about 44-minutes.

So far (we’re in season 5) there have been 13-episodes.

Here’s the unique selling proposition of streaming content:  If you (and a spousal unit or friends) were to watch the show on the originating network, you would be bombarded with 16-minutes per episode of useless ads.  You don’t need to be told “Tell your doctor” anymore, do you?

208-minutes of ad impressions per season – which (rounding off) is 3-1/2 HOURS of having an electronic salesman and brainwasher in your living room.  What’s it worth to get ’em out?

So Amazon has a simple proposition:  It works out to $2.61 per episode to watch  commercial-free and in 25% less time.  What’s your time worth?

We don’t watch too many series this way.  Blacklist, Lucifer, Scandal, Suits (when it was, pre-Prince) and occasional fresh movies.  But for fill-in entertainment both the Prime flicks & series, plus a Netflix account and that Free-To-Air foreign television coming down off Galaxy at 99-West…it’s not like we lack material to choose from!

Toss in news commentary (Suspicious Observers on  YT is amusing, and who can get enough TedTalks and TedX) and pretty quickly, your “electronic information dance card” is full.

Information has gone the way of everything else – commoditization.

Recently, on the Peoplenomics side of the house, we presented the idea that we’re in a massive tech-driven period of industrial overlap.  The “old industries” are dying.  Ask our former TV engineer colleagues about forced retirements and at the same time, replacement jobs don’t have an economic basis.

Don’t register with the crooks of higher ed, though.

That’s why we still have journalism schools cranking out papered grads with no more than a student loan bill to look forward to.  We’re not being honest with ourselves about the future.  Software is taking over the writing and rewriting game.

Today, I’m conducting patent research on a marvelous new accessory for mobile devices that I’ve come up with.  Much as I would like to tell you about it, can’t do that until the provisional patent ap is pending.  But, from the ground up it’s a “quick hit” idea.  In and out.  That’s today’s world.

But that process underscores how we are navigating through these big, fundamental changes.  Once you have the internet and you’re on fiber…how do you fix the ultimate speed-bump – human I/O speed?

There is, indeed a level of crookedness to the whole shebang.  Stock buy-backs seem to be coming back into vogue since there’s little else left worth buying.  And there’s a practical limit to how many new “features” can be shoved into phones, too.

Want an app to make scrambled eggs and bacon?  All doable with our combination GPS/Microwave oven that connects via Bluetooth, lol.

If it sounds like Ure’s truly has lost his freaking mind, that’s not the case.  Something a little bigger has, though:

The world.

Something Fishy About Mueller

A meeting in the Seychelles (up and coming tax-advantaged place) between an influential Russian wealth fund manager on and Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater Security may prove to be one of the dumbest, most outrageous examples of prosecutorial over-reach ever.

Remember:  Mueller is charged with finding alleged collusion between Trump’s election campaign and the Russia, not a single useful charge has been found more than a year in.

The story now is POST ELECTIOIN – writ large in the Washington Post this today –  as it reveals itself to have nothing to do with the election and was likely NORMAL back-channel set-up for office.  The kind of footwork other administrations have done to hit the ground running.  You don’t think Slick Willy (Clinton) had some back channels going?  I’m betting Bush did, and Obama likely did, too.

It’s called “hit the ground running.”

Seems to us Mueller’s angling for another useless process crime and at this stage of the fishing trip, looks like the fish dangling on the line is Erik Prince.

As a reporter, though, two useful facts:

First, the WaPo story is time-lined:  well-after the election – so Mueller seems to us out of bounds on that score:

“In January 2017, Erik Prince, the founder of the private security company Blackwater, met with a Russian official close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and later described the meeting to congressional investigators as a chance encounter that was not a planned discussion of U.S.-Russia relations.“

Secondly, since whoever was in the intelligence agencies when Trump took over were hand-picked Obamanistas,  I wouldn’t trust a single damn one of them to give me (had I just been elected president) a straight, non-political answer to ANYTHING.

No doubt, Mueller will go Hatch Acting – saying Prince this and that…yada, yada.

But given the clown posse (apparently guilty of CRIMES like unmasking – still not prosecuted by the derelict Mueller, along with Clinton’s [alleged’] violations involving emails, pay-for-play, Uranium 1, and so on… it’s not surprising that the witch-hunt/fishing trip promises to continue several centuries into the future.

The “Scopes Climate Trial”

Speaking of time-wasters and BS, here’s another one:  Global Warming is going to court.  It promises to be the climate rhyme off the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial.  Wiki it:

“The Scopes Trial, formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case in July 1925 in which a substitute high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee‘s Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school.^[1] The trial was deliberately staged in order to attract publicity to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where it was held. Scopes was unsure whether he had ever actually taught evolution, but he purposely incriminated himself so that the case could have a defendant.“

Details?  In San Francisco, a case involving “climate science” is headed to a hearing and the write up on it here sounds interesting.

Except, of course, that the judge in the case is one William Alsup.

Let me demonstrate my amazing prescience when comes to courts and legal affairs:

I hereby predict Judge Alsup will find for the climate change promoters.

I’m a genius, right?

No?

You mean I just remember Alsup was appointed by Bill Clinton and here’s the guy that took a probably-illegal DACA case and issued a stay against the Trump administration when they decided to rescind it?  Yup, same dude.

Between you and me, when a federal judge in California begins legislating from the bench on DACA TO the President, no question in our minds how he’ll rule on something with as much hype as “climate change.”

Wait and see me proven right (again).

I do not deny long term global warming is real.

The real rate of change – and bilking the public, however, is a different matter.

A few thousand years ago, there was an Ice Age and sea level was 300-feet lower.  No one’s arguing that.

What IS ARGUABLE is whether the combination of jiggered data, heat islanding, Gore pontificating, and Obama getting the dough to launch the carbon exchange is provable science.

That’s the boundary in this case and when (not if) Alsup rules it will polish the false mantel of legitimacy on crooked science which I hold would be different had equal dollars had been spent looking impartially at both sides…no just one….in the whole debate.

You write checks to one side of an issue and guess what the results are!  Gee, who’d have thought.

But hey!  Look at the bright side!  This will give demagogues…no, make that democrats…more buttressing of their efforts to mobilize mass thought control.  It’s all part of the Take-Down of America.

The Mob will agree that NuSpeak is the only Truth and here come the social enforcers.  Net controls on free speech will be real in five years here…as if the recent shenanigans of FB and Google…well, don’t get me started.

(Why isn’t Mueller looking into weighted search results for Hillary which we covered at the time?  Ooops…don’t ask, don’t tell, eh?)

Are you following this, Citizen?

California Succession Nonsense

We are – at least in theory – one nation when comes to federal laws and such.

Now we have noted democrat governor Jerry Brown saying Trump is basically going to war with California over illegal immigration and sanctuary cities.

Brown’s degree being in law, I would havce thought he’d understand the relationship of state to federal law.  Maybe he skipped that class on federal supremacy.  Who knows.

Markets will pop 50 at the open.

Moron the ‘morrow.

George Ure

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/George-Ure/e/B0098M3VY8%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share UrbanSurvival Bio: https://urbansurvival.com/about-george-ure/

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