Recent Comments

1. 2 days ago on ViewsEurope

   It turns out that just shouting about a problem doesn’t solve it. Go figure.

2. 2 days ago on Jack Ohman

   The more I hear about this, the more it reminds me of big tobacco and their years of counter-offensive on science. The difference seems to be that tobacco harmed both the immediate consumer and folks around them, while this only effects others. But we’re all “others.”

3. 5 days ago on Matt Wuerker

   Welcome back!

   You’ve been missed, and you missed (I hope) a lot!

4. 5 days ago on ViewsAmerica

   I just did a quick calculation.. if you took Mary Barra’s entire (reported) pay and divided it evenly between all the employees, it would amount to roughly a 0.3% pay raise. That’s more than I’d guessed ahead of doing the calculation.

   That aside, the real issue here is the union system in the north, non-union in the south, and the prospect of jobs moving south as the electric car re-tooling takes place. I’m sympathetic with the case from the UAW that the government is effectively funding that through support for electric vehicles.

5. 6 days ago on Tim Campbell

   Tim scores again!

6. 6 days ago on Joe Heller

   I think what’s most objectionable to the UAW situation is the pay “tiers.” It has been described as people getting different pay for the same jobs and qualifications, coming about as part of the agreement back in the great recession. That should be removed going forward, and that does not necessarily moving the lower tiers up to match the upper. They should negotiate toward an overall package, and then level by moving down and up in a dollar neutral way.

   Beyond that, the real issue here is the union north vs the non-union south. If the UAW pushes too hard, this will just result in jobs moving south. OTOH there is no doubt in my mind that as their pay goes up, there will be pressure from employees in the south to get raises as well.

   I do also agree that the workers have been taken too much for granted by the companies. In the past union leadership has been pretty sloppy, but they now seem to be more strategically focused, as shown by deploying an action designed for maximum disruption with a minimum total number of strikers. It’s good to see union leadership that is more competent.

7. 7 days ago on Robert Ariail

   That idiot pachyderm doesn’t even know how to hitch up a stalking horse!

8. 9 days ago on Working Daze

   Yeah, I know. I’m pretty old school – never really adjusted to OO.

9. 9 days ago on Working Daze

   According to it’s creator, it stands for Perversely Eclectic Rubbish Lister.

   It’s actually a solid scripting language with a massive set of independently developed loadable modules that can be used to do a huge range of computing tasks. These days it is considered to be a bit long in the tooth, and Python seems to be taking its place.

10. 10 days ago on Mike Luckovich

    This week’s Economist (Sept 9-15, p. 81) has a truly startling plot on consumer sentiment.

    I shows a consumer confidence index from 1980 to the present, comparing an actual measure (from surveys) to a calculated index that one would expect from economic data. The two lines track each other nicely over 4 decades, but post pandemic they begin to diverge, reaching what looks like about a 30% difference now. If it were the pandemic, it would have begun to narrow again, but it continues to grow. This is quantitative evidence of what we all see anecdotally, which is that people’s perceptions are divorced from reality.

    The cause? In my mind it is the poison spread by the GOP, but it may go well beyond that, given the recent manipulation of media, both conventional and social.