Recent comments

  • there will also be a corresponding 1.7% increase in the income tax brackets, which means that the highest marginal tax rate of 39.6% wont kick in until taxable income of an individual exceeds $406,750 in 2014...and the dead will get an even greater increase than the elderly and the rich, as the individual estate-tax exclusion, which is now also pegged to inflation, will be $5.34 million in 2014, up from $5.25 million currently...

    Reply to: There Will Be a 1.5% Increase in Social Security Benefits Next Year   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • As noted earlier, the truth is coming out on foxes in the henhouse, only Zerohedge can frame it in the true corrupt, crony capitalism it is.

    Reply to: The Failure of Obama's Healthcare.gov Website is Poetic Justice   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • I pity these people but they are finding a Google engineer, one guy, and unfortunately also Oracle, which assuredly is part of the problem with their databases. Redhat is good to get on board, I have no idea what they are doing with servers but their enterprise should do the trick, or some Linux group with a commonly used open source distro, such as CentOS.

    Frankly, they should hand over the entire contract, all of it, to Google, Amazon and Ebay. All three know how to design e-commerce sites with many databases, dynamic content, scripts galore and millions of transactions that must be secured.

    What are these people even thinking? If they wanted to design the Amazon or Ebay of Healthcare, well, uh, ask Amazon or Ebay to design the thing!

    Amazon esp. knows their stuff on "cloud" or distributed servers, most use their AWS, etc.

    Reply to: The Failure of Obama's Healthcare.gov Website is Poetic Justice   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • Getting this Congress and especially this administration to confront currency manipulation, never mind enact a manufacturing policy, tax incentives and so on to reshore jobs and revitalize U.S. manufacturing seems like a pipe dream at this point.

    America is having trouble just stopping Congress from pushing America over the brink and down the economic cliff over and over. We have a President who is being brought down over a website. While it is most amusing to see politicians talking about a website and being so technically clueless to boot, getting them to listen in the least to real economists and policy experts crafting action items to get America's manufacturing back seems like a joke.

    Only if that expert is a billionaire with millions in donations and other perks could they get an ear in D.C.

    Reply to: America Needs More Than "Market Forces" To Have A Real Manufacturing Renaissance   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • the weather plays an oversized role in utility production and hence has a big impact on the overall, even though it's only a tenth of the total...september was the 4th warmest on record, hence there was a lot of AC usage...same thing happened in March, when a much colder than normal month boosted utilities 6.4% and carried the overall index..but spring and summer were moderate otherwise, and we gave all that "production" back...watch for the same next few months if the winter is mild...

    Reply to: Industrial Production Finally Hits Pre-Recession Levels in September 2013   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • After I write up these overviews I commonly check out the overall headline buzz of the main stream press. We must be reading different reports for manufacturing has been on the bane forever, this is nothing new and overall the report doesn't indicate anything really bad as some are trying to claim. It is the typical bad America has been experiencing for over six years, nothing new.

    Reply to: Industrial Production Finally Hits Pre-Recession Levels in September 2013   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • People get confused so often between the two I decided to break up the overviews into two separate articles.

    I think the BLS should separate the releases. They could release them both on the same day but put out two separate releases to help make it clear they are separate surveys.

    I mean, come on, even people in finance, economics have to go study this thing to understand it, yet the reports making blaring headlines around the globe.

    Reply to: A Graphic Look at Payrolls from the September Employment Report   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • i see what has happened there....i'll have to think about what that implies...

    one thought that comes to mind is that the surveys should not be released together, because that suggests they're measuring the same population, when they are not..

    Reply to: A Graphic Look at Payrolls from the September Employment Report   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • There has been delays and out of syncs like this many times. They are different time windows, one is a week, where work is defined as even 1 hour or 15 hours of UNPAID,, the other is the 12th of the month but defined by "pay period" and most workers in the U.S. are paid bi-weekly.. CPS error margin 400k, CES, 100k. CES way larger than CPS.

    Below is a graph of CPS employed against CES/Payrolls employment, both not seasonally adjusted.

     

     

    There is an express, looking for signal in the noise floor. So, I think you're in the noise floor when looking at NSA on a monthly basis.

    Reply to: A Graphic Look at Payrolls from the September Employment Report   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • i understand there was a 882,600 job seasonal increase in employment at local school districts, which was adjusted down to a net payroll jobs gain of just 9,500, and a 468,000 seasonal decrease in jobs in leisure and hospitality, as most temporary summer jobs wound down, which was also almost wiped out by the seasonal adjustment, but what i still cant see is that if one survey says there's an abnormal increase or decrease in jobs in a given month and adjusts it to norm, then why does the other survey do the opposite in the same time frame?

    Reply to: A Graphic Look at Payrolls from the September Employment Report   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • I think generally it is a big mistake to try to make sense out of the monthly difference between seasonal and not seasonally adjusted on employment. It really varies. Because it varies so much the fact two large adjustments do not coincidence in a month could just mean the date of the surveys and the reference windows.

    Take a look in Fred, as an example on just payrolls and you can do the same on employed for the CPS. Pretty clear employment is really cyclical (which is scary considering how people need full time jobs year round, but it also might be "hiring seasons" for full time, year round causing this).

    http://research.stlouisfed.org/fredgraph.png?g=nN9

    Reply to: A Graphic Look at Payrolls from the September Employment Report   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • the unadjusted payroll data showed a gain of 411,000 jobs in August; but the seasonal adjustment lowered that to 193,000 jobs gained, while September's unadjusted establishment survey data showed an increase of 612,000 jobs, which was lowered by the seasonal adjustment to the headline 148,000 job gain...conversely, the household survey showed a 604,000 drop in the count of the employed in August, which was raised to a loss of just 115,000 in the employed, while in this September household survey, unadjusted employment rose 142,000, and the seasonally adjustment lowered that by a trivial 9,000 to an increase of 133,000 employed...so, over the course of the past two months, the seasonal adjustments subtracted 682,000 from the payroll jobs recorded by the establishment survey, while the seasonal adjustments on the household survey added 480,000 to the count of those employed...

    so, why is there such a great disparity between the seasonal adjustments in the two surveys? since they do contact different demographics, i wouldn't expect them to move in lockstep, but that much of a divergence just doesn't make sense...

    Reply to: A Graphic Look at Payrolls from the September Employment Report   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • Well Numarian and his Cronies, Democrats, will always have the Tea Party or the Republicans to Blame. 5yrs into this Mess now taking on even Bigger Mess ACA, and there still Blaming anyone & everyone but themselves. What Happened to the Buck Stops here.

    Reply to: The Invisible Debt Ceiling   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • Sanders has been one of the most realistic politicians on this, knowing labor supply will affect people's ability to get jobs and wages. Yet, he caved, 100% on this bill.

    Sessions on this issue has pointed out a lot of common sense, which is strange since on other issues he has none.

    I think the votes reflect simply who is bought and paid for, along with horse trading behind the scenes and has nothing to do with analyzing labor markets, needs, wages and supply in a dynamic economy.

    Instead, they simply deny this impacts significantly U.S. citizens income and livelihoods.

    Reply to: The Failure of Obama's Healthcare.gov Website is Poetic Justice   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • Senator Jeff Sessions for President.

    People like Bernie Sanders are sometimes on the correct side of this issue, but they fold under pressure. Sessions has been amazing at the abuse he has endured on our behalf. If you care about these issues, call his office and leave a message with a staffer to encourage him.

    Ultimately diagnosis is only half the problem. We also need to punish our friends and reward our enemies. Voting for empty words or the lesser-of-two evils is not gonna work. If all of us affected by these issues would vow to never vote for the likes of McCain and Rubio, and support people like Sessions, we would perhaps be moving forward instead of backwards.

    Sessions for President.

    Reply to: The Failure of Obama's Healthcare.gov Website is Poetic Justice   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • All point to open source being used and not attributed. That's most common in themes, the "site look". The author of the code uses latin text to demo a blog post, a page, titles, bullet points etc. So, beyond Sprymedia script used, I suspect there is tons of open sourced code and unfortunately it is like it was just thrown in the soup.

    It is like there is no CTO, or software architect, the one who designs the system, top down design here.

    This is absolutely incredible the costs already exceed so many major sites like Facebook, Twitter and even the iPhone.

    iOS is incredibly complex it needs to run concurrent processes with as little power requirements as possible and three different types of networks, plus the component design is an art form on these phones.

    It's just unbelievable what is going on here with IT government contracts generally.

    Tea party are crazy but Obama is beyond belief corrupt as are most in D.C., that's the real problem. We do not have competent legislators who know how to manage a country and they do not act in the public interest, the majority interest, represent the nation's interests.

    In terms of Obama, I am wondering if his crazed 2008 supporters are still around. Let's see, we have the NSA spying on Americans plus hacking into the cell phones of government leaders. Nice. The track record of pushing corporate agendas and violating constitutional rights seem to just continue to grow.

    I would imagine the Nobel committee is feeling embarrassed as hell by now.

    Reply to: The Failure of Obama's Healthcare.gov Website is Poetic Justice   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • John McAfee, who founded the internet security firm bearing his name, called Obamacare "A Hacker’s Wet Dream"; there's also been allegations that copyrighted software was pirated and used without attribution...

    Reply to: The Failure of Obama's Healthcare.gov Website is Poetic Justice   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • From last week, CA added over 11,000 more initial claims and check out this graph to see the obvious distortions this adding.

    That said, initial claims also increased in other states by around 2,200 so it could very well be initial claims have increased overall. We cannot tell much about what is really going on as long as California is reporting over 80,000 initial claims in a week though.

    Reply to: What's Going On With Initial Unemployment Claims?   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • The problem is that almost none of the American population knows anything about basic economics. As a result, they support legislation that is and vote for politicians who are harmful to economic growth and well being. People spend vast amounts of their time on crap, but if -- out of all the hours available in their entire life spans -- they would once spend only a handful of hours reading Economics in One Lesson, by Hazlitt, or Basic Economics, by Sowell, our nation would be far better off.

    Politicians do what gets them elected. It is ultimately the responsibility of the people for their own fate.

    Reply to: Maps of Economic Disaster   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:
  • No mention of anything else, so which is worse, across the board of that attack on working America?

    Reply to: Government Shutdown: Postscript & Consequences   11 years 1 month ago
    EPer:

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