Ones and Zeros

Senator Jim Bunning has now apparently raised his block against extending unemployment benefits.  His stated motivation was to impose fiscal pay-as-you-go discipline by saying “Tough Shit” to Americans.  But in May 2007 Sen Jim Bunning voted for $120 billion for the war in Iraq.  He’s comfortable going into debt for war against a country that didn’t attack us (Iraq), but not for US citizens who’ve lost their jobs due to financiers.  Financiers that are already bailed out.

There’s also plenty of spin going on to attempt to make sense of Bunning’s effort. Michelle Malkin’s saying that he just wanted everyone on the record for example. Others have said that unemployement benefits cause people to NOT look for jobs.  The first is clearly overkill.  The second is ridiculous for anyone who’s been laid off.  Frankly unemployment benefits won’t replace any reasonable salary.

It’s been a pretty good while now, and my posting was getting sparse before that.  Despite the news with health care, various items of note in economics, and more recently a guy with a bomb in his pants I’ve not been around.

My day job has been occupying a very large portion of my time for the last three or four months.  In engineering project work it’s not uncommon to have a “push” where long hours are required.  This is usually a week or two, occasionally as much as a month.  Three months is not common and was due to budget shrinkage with no work shrinkage, I’m supremely glad that’s over.

There are plenty of other people doing year-end retrospectives; let’s look forward here in a few areas.

Economy:  It won’t be getting better for many of us.  If your idea of economy = Wall Street, you’ll probably be ok for a while at least.  But Wall Street can’t be isolated from the real world forever.  The hangover in the lack of jobs and the consequent poor consumer spending will affect us for some years yet.  The stimulus helped, but it was too small.  It will also be years before the housing bubble is resolved as housing is comparatively illiquid.  In short 2010 will be a lot like 2009 without some of the higher drama perhaps.

Politics: What can I say here?  The GOP is against everything and for nothing.  The Dems are trying to keep everyone happy - a losing game - and ended up with a weak and watered down health care bill.  The next year looks like the same: the GOP will continue to be the party of the irrational tantrum and the Dems will continue to ignore the progressives that got them elected.  Lawrence Lessig is right.  Without reforming the election process, there is no progress.

Aviation: For me 2010 won’t bring a new rating as it did last year.  (Unless my company funds it, which is very unlikely.) In a less self-centered view, I’m told that all the GA aviation companies are focusing on glass panel instruments now.  The AOPA show in Tampa had very few people that were pushing round dials.  So expect the technology revolution in aviation to continue and to probably accelerate into new areas. The FAA is continuing to move toward a GPS-based nav system.  The little problem of single points of failure is dictating some sort of backup.  But GPS and WAAS is the way they’re going.

Technology: It seems like Apple may kick off their tablet computer early in 2010.  Google will follow with theirs of course. They’re both planning to remake computing as  we know it again.  They’ll probably both succeed in some way too.  It’ll be a big year.  The “maker” movement will continue to pick up steam and is an outgrowth of open source tech.  This is a good thing and offers hope for future technical growth.  The risks in tech are the ongoing dilution of privacy and security for our information.  I’m more concerned about out government and our companies misusing information about me that I am with terrorism.  The former is infinitely more common.

If we can survive the economy and the political battles of officials who’ve forgotten how they were elected, we’ll be ok.  I do believe things are getting better over the long run.  It is hard to see that long run on a day-to-day basis sometimes.  Keep the faith, and may your new year be a good year for you.

There’s Fed Chair Ben Bernacke saying we’re past the recession.  Meanwhile Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says that we’ve got a long way to go.  They’re both right.

It all depends on what the meaning of the word “recession” is.
As usual Paul Krugman puts it clearly.  The recession is over but there’s a shortfall of unused people and unused economic resources (shut down factories and unused equipment).  It will take some time to get those people and equipment back into use.

Recession is basically defined as declining GDP.  Yet most of use don’t mean that when we use the term.  We mean that we know of too many people who lost their jobs, that we’re worried about our job, and that we see stores and businesses closing.

The economy has to keep expanding to keep us all growing economically.  Some 50,000 jobs need to be created each month nationwide to maintain a normal job growth rate.  Right now we’ve lost around 8% of GDP since late 2007/early 2008 when Bush was telling us we’re fine economically.  We seem to be basically flat right now - neither growing nor shrinking much.  We’re not technically in a recession.  But we’ve got a lot of people, equipment, buildings, and factories either completely idle or underused. In the case of people, they’re either unemployed or we’ve got top chefs, accountants, and engineers making burgers.

It will take some time to grow our way back to “normal”.  So the recession is over, but that doesn’t mean much for us day-to-day.  There’s nothing wrong with the honest work of flipping burgers for those accountants and others above, but it would be better for the economy if highly trained people were working where they could use their training.

This isn’t just a US problem.  The world shipping fleet is 12% unused. That rate used to be a around 0.1%.  Consumer demand has dropped off a cliff and goods don’t need to be shipped from producers to consumers.  Since jobs in one place  are connected by shipping to purchases in other places then we’re all in this boat together.

Karl Rove was to be the architect of the GOP permanent majority, but the legacy of the Bush administration is a Democratic majority. Note that I’m not keen on permanent majorities of any party. I think a good debate of a variety of points of view is a good idea. It’d be nice if the GOP would participate in that instead of lying and making up nonsense. Birthers, rabble-rousers, health care lies and other nonsense doesn’t further any useful or rational debate.

However, this strategy isn’t helping the GOP. The follow graphics struck me in their similarity that shows the effect of political mismanagement. Gallup released a poll of political party affiliation by state with the graphic below.

The above political map has some interesting correlation with the following unemployment map from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Funny how that works: Mismanage the country and screw up the economy and we’ll all eventually pay attention and vote you out.