06 February 2025

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Initial Claims


Falling productivity
And this time, I am a part of the initial unemployment claim statistics.

Needless to say, I'm pessimistic, though it should be noted that the fact that I just lost my job, which is not something that inspires confidence.

The number of Americans filing new applications for unemployment benefits increased moderately last week, consistent with steadily easing labor market conditions, though opportunities for those out of work are becoming scarce amid tepid hiring.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 11,000 to a seasonally adjusted 219,000 for the week ended February 1, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 213,000 claims for the latest week.

"There is nothing to worry about here," said Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics.
Unadjusted claims increased 11,370 to 239,690, with applications in New York soaring by 4,092. Filings rose by 3,999 in California, likely reflecting some residual effects from the recent fires in Los Angeles. Claims dropped by 1,343 in New Jersey. There were no significant increases or decreases for the rest of the states, territories and the District of Columbia

………

Low layoffs are underpinning the labor market, though work opportunities are becoming more scarce for those who are unemployed. The government reported on Tuesday that there were 1.1 job openings for every unemployed person in December, down from 1.15 in November.
The number of people receiving benefits after an initial week of aid, a proxy for hiring, increased 36,000 to a seasonally adjusted 1.886 million during the week ending January 25, the claims report showed.

………

Though business sentiment perked up in the aftermath of Trump's victory in November, hiring plans have remained lackluster amid expectations that demand will slow this year because of still-restrictive monetary policy and higher prices from tariffs.

A report from global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas on Thursday showed U.S. employers announced plans to hire 6,089 workers in January, down 24% from December. Plans were up 13% from January 2024, which was the lowest reading for the month of January on record.

………

Nonfarm productivity, which measures hourly output per worker, increased at a 1.2% annualized rate in the fourth quarter after growing at an upwardly revised 2.3% pace in the July-September quarter.
Economists had forecast productivity would advance at a 1.4% rate after increasing at a previously reported 2.2% pace in the third quarter. Productivity increased at a 1.6% rate from a year ago. It grew 2.3% in 2024, accelerating from 1.6% in 2023.

Productivity has expanded at a 1.8% rate since the fourth quarter of 2019, higher than the 1.5% pace in the prior business cycle that ran from the fourth quarter of 2007 through the fourth quarter of 2019. It is, however, below the long-term rate of 2.1%.

So, hiring is down, (bad for me) and productivity growth is slowing (bad for me).

I am NOT happy right now.

 

05 February 2025

What You Do When You Are Losing

Following court hearings where the judge appeared to be EXTREMELY unreceptive to Department of Justice arguments, Trump and his Evil Minions™ have agreed to restrict Elon Musk's access to the US Government payment systems.

Attorneys for the Justice Department have agreed to temporarily restrict staffers associated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing information in the Treasury Department’s payment system.

The agreement comes after a group of union members and retirees sued the Treasury Department alleging that providing DOGE access to the federal government’s massive payment and collections system — and the personal data housed in it — violated federal privacy laws.

The Trump administration filed a motion Wednesday night seeking to enter a proposed order that detailed the agreed-upon terms.

"The Defendants will not provide access to any payment record or payment system of records maintained by or within the Bureau of the Fiscal Service," the proposed order says.

The order would allow exceptions for two special government employees at the Treasury — Tom Krause and Marko Elez — saying they are permitted access "as needed" to perform their duties, "provided that such access to payment records will be 'read only.'"

The restricted access would remain in effect pending a subsequent hearing on the lawsuit. The judge still needs to sign off on the proposed order.

It's clear that the hope here is that they have done this because otherwise the Judge would be creating an injunction of far wider scope.

Musk's attempt to seize the government's payments system are in violation of federal privacy statutes and open government laws, and possibly more laws besides.

This is f%$#ed up and sh%$.

What a remarkably lawless group of people.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

There is Trump Crazy, and there is Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ crazy, and then there is
proposing the mass expulsion of the Palestinian residents of Gaza to make way for a beach resort development owned by the United States crazy.

This is King Canute ordering the tide to recede* crazy.

I'm thinking that this might be tertiary syphilis.

Donald Trump’s proposal for a US takeover of Gaza was met with anger and blunt rejection from regional allies, delight from Israel’s far right and a warning against “ethnic cleansing” from the head of the UN.

The secretary general, António Guterres, planned to tell a UN meeting on Wednesday that “it is essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing” after the US president said he wanted to “own” Gaza and resettle its Palestinian residents elsewhere.


An unusually broad wave of international outrage and condemnation followed Trump’s shock announcement after a meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Germany warned that the plan violated international law and Brazil’s president described it as “incomprehensible”, with China stating it opposed “forced transfer”.

………

Both regional critics and supporters recognised that Trump’s vision for a “Riviera for the Middle East” was novel only in seeking to insert the US directly into the heart of one of the most volatile, long-running conflicts in the world.

It is premised on emptying Gaza of its residents, effectively a call for ethnic cleansing, and follows decades of debates in the Israeli right over whether Palestinians can be forced from the territory or encouraged to leave with economic incentives.


Trump wants neighbouring countries that are heavily dependent on US aid and military support, including Egypt and Jordan, to offer new homes to large numbers of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents.

I assume that he wants the resorts to be operated by the Trump Org.

This is completely insane.

*Canute did issue such an order, but it a way to rebuke cortiers who were to adulatory of him. He was showing them that his power was not absolute.

No, I don't believe this.  I am not suggesting that I actually see any signs of syphilis. I'm an engineer, not a doctor, dammit. This is sarcasm for effect

04 February 2025

About Right, I Think

Former New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez (D) has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for corruption.

Seeing as how people jailed for federal crimes typically serve 85% of their sentence, this would have him in jail for about 9 years and 4 months.

Seems about right to me:

Former U.S. senator Bob Menendez on Wednesday was sentenced to 11 years in prison for operating what prosecutors called one of the most brazen corruption schemes in the country’s history, with bribes totaling nearly $1 million in cash, checks, gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz.

The longtime New Jersey lawmaker was convicted of all charges last year in Manhattan federal court, forcing his resignation after nearly 18 years in the Senate and a half-century in politics. A jury found that Menendez took bribes from three New Jersey businessmen who sought his help quashing criminal investigations and securing lucrative deals with officials from Egypt and Qatar. He is appealing.

Menendez, 71, is the first public official in the United States to be convicted of acting as a foreign agent. Text messages and emails showed how he maneuvered to get U.S. military aid and sensitive, unclassified information to Egypt between 2018 and 2022 from his powerful perch as the highest-ranking Democratic member and later chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

It took long enough. 

I know that corruption is common in the toxic waste Garden State, but this has been an open secret for well over a decade.

F%$# Me, I Agree with a WSJ Editorial (I miss "Say F%$# January)

To be fair, they lauded Elizabeth Warren's take-down of RFK, Jr., so I do not feel bad about being on the same side of the issue.

Still, it is a, "Human sacrifice. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!" moment:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledged during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday to root out corruption between industry and government. Yet the man who wants to be the nation’s Secretary of Health and Human Services refused to rule out personally making money from lawsuits against drug makers. This ought to be disqualifying. 

“You just said that you want the American people to know you can’t be bought, your decisions won’t depend on how much money you could make in the future, you won’t go to work for a drug company after you leave HHS,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said. “But you and I both know there’s another way to make money.” Ah, yes. A fellow friend of trial lawyers, Ms. Warren knows their playbook.

Yeah, they gotta make a swipe at, "Trial Lawyers," because rat-f%$#ers gotta rat-f%$#. ((I REALLY miss "Say F%$# January)

Mr. Kennedy’s disclosures show that he has received more than $2.5 million from law firms that have sued drug and vaccine makers. He also has a financial stake in a pending lawsuit against human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine maker Merck. Mr. Kennedy’s trial-lawyer ties and financial interests in litigation against drug makers pose a clear conflict of interest.

Ms. Warren asked RFK Jr. to commit to not “suing the drug companies, and taking your rake out of that, while you are Secretary and for four years after.” He refused. “You’re asking me to not sue drug companies, and I am not going to agree to that,” he said. Why not?

………

We never thought we’d hear [I think that they mean, "say," not, "here".] this, but Ms. Warren has an excellent point that Mr. Kennedy, as HHS Secretary, could have the ability to “kill off access to vaccines and make millions of dollars while he does it.” This ought to trouble Republican Senators who profess to care about good government and public health.

We live in strange times.

Also, RFK, Jr. is a corrupt con man whose anti-vaccine crusade has been about enriching RFJ, Jr. more than anything else.


03 February 2025

D'oh!

What happens when you realize that you have not updated your resume in 4 years.

Well, this sucks.

The Endgame

A fight is brewing in the EU over returning to Russian gas supplies after the war in the Ukraine ends.

The Baltics and Poland are opposed, while 

European officials are debating whether Russian pipeline gas sales to the EU should be restarted as part of a potential settlement to end the war against Ukraine, according to people familiar with discussions.

Advocates of buying Russian gas argue it would bring down high energy prices in Europe, encourage Moscow to the negotiating table, and give both sides a reason to implement and maintain a ceasefire.

But raising the idea of reopening flows of Russian gas into Europe, even in preliminary discussions, has already sparked a backlash among Ukraine’s closest allies in the EU.

Three of the officials briefed on the talks said the idea had been endorsed by some German and Hungarian officials, with support from other capitals that saw it as a way to reduce European energy costs. 

………

Floating the resumption of pipeline sales from Russia has infuriated Brussels officials and diplomats from some eastern European countries, many of whom have spent the past three years working to reduce the amount of Russian energy being imported into the bloc.

Not sure how this is going to shake out, but it's clear that heavy industry in Europe has been absolutely hammered by high energy prices, and the high price of LNG imports does not help.

It is going to be interesting to see where this all goes.
 

About USAID

Notwithstanding attempts to portray the office and its staff as hippie freaks singing kumbaya, USAID has always been an instrument of the most brutal aspects of US foreign policy.

It would seem to me that USAID, and its fairly obvious role in regime changed, torture, and the like would be something that Donald Trump and President Musk would like.

The funding for disease prevention and the rest is just a cover.

02 February 2025

Grimmest Thing Ever in The Onion

Like most of the things in The Onion, this is funny in no small part because it is true.

This article, titled, "No Matter How Many Chili Cook-Offs I Win, Everyone Still Sees Me As ‘That School Shooter’s Mom’," is incredibly dark humor.

This humor is so dark that Derek Chauvin would suffocate it to death.

This humor is so dark that Michael Slager would have shot it in the back.

This humor is so dark that ……… Well, you get the point.

Quote of the Day

[OpenAI Chief Sam] Altman is, in essence, the Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf [Baghdad Bob] of tech — the Saddam-era Iraqi Minister of Information who, as Abrams tanks entered Baghdad and gunfire could be heard in the background, proclaimed an entirely counterfactual world where the coalition forces weren’t merely losing, but American troops were “committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad.” It’s adorable, and yes, it’s also understandable, but nobody should — or could — believe that OpenAI hasn’t just suffered some form of existential wound.
Edward Zitron, on the shock from DeepSeek's efficient and competitive AI model shows that, "The American tech industry is incurious, lazy, entitled, directionless and irresponsible.

I have always said that the enormous capital demanded by LLM artificial intelligence is a feature, not a bug.

Their goal was to use the enormous investment that they were demanding to create a moat around the field which they could then use to extort monopoly rents.

Not any more.

An Old Classic Sees New Interested

During WWII, the OSS, the progenitor of the CIA came up with a manual explaining how to disrupt and sabotage organizations.

Basically, it came down to being an officious asshole.

It is seeing a lot more popular these days:

A declassified World War II-era government guide to “simple sabotage” is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and “describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly.”

Over the last week, the guide has surged to become the 5th-most-accessed book on Project Gutenberg, an open source repository of free and public domain ebooks. It is also the fifth most popular ebook on the site over the last 30 days, having been accessed nearly 60,000 times over the last month (just behind Romeo and Juliet).


………

Because it was written during active wartime, the book includes various suggestions for causing physical violence and destruction, such as starting fires, flooding warehouses, breaking tools, etc. But it also includes many suggestions for how to just generally be annoying within a bureaucracy or office setting. Simple sabotage ideas include:
  • “Insist on doing everything through ‘channels.’ Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.”
  • “Make ‘speeches.’ Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate ‘patriotic’ comments.”
  • “Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.”
  • “Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.”
  • “‘Misunderstand’ orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can.”
  • “In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that the important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers of poor machines.”
  • “To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.”
  • “Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.”
  • “Multiply paperwork in plausible ways.”
  • “Make mistakes in quantities of material when you are copying orders. Confuse similar names. Use wrong addresses.”
  • “Work slowly. Think out ways to increase the number of movements necessary on your job”
  • “Pretend that instructions are hard to understand, and ask to have them repeated more than once. Or pretend that you are particularly anxious to do your work, and pester the foreman with unnecessary questions.”
  • “Snarl up administration in every possible way. Fill out forms illegibly so that they will have to be done over; make mistakes or omit requested information in forms.”

I know what some of you are thinking, "These techniques were developed to fight Nazis who occupied their countries.  Is this really necessary?"

The answer is YES.

01 February 2025

Of Course They Are

Following much ass-kissing of Trump, the DoJ is looking to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

I'm disappointed, but not surprised: 

Senior Justice Department officials under President Trump have held discussions with federal prosecutors in Manhattan about the possibility of dropping their corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, according to five people with knowledge of the matter.

The officials have also spoken to Mr. Adams’s defense team since Mr. Trump took office, the people said. The defense team is led by Alex Spiro, who is also the personal lawyer for Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and one of the president’s closest advisers.

Mr. Trump has the power to pardon Mr. Adams, who as New York City’s mayor could aid his plans for mass deportations. In December, Mr. Trump said that the mayor had been treated “pretty unfairly” by prosecutors and suggested he was considering issuing a pardon.

But if prosecutors were to dismiss the case entirely, it could allow Mr. Adams to insist on his innocence to voters as he seeks another term as mayor, while allowing Mr. Trump to avoid the appearance of a pardon that many might view as unwarranted.

………

Mr. Adams was indicted in September on charges including bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions after an investigation that began in 2021. He has pleaded not guilty, maintained his innocence and contended that he is being prosecuted because he criticized the Biden administration’s immigration policies as New York has received a historic influx of migrants. Federal prosecutors have firmly rebutted that claim.

It's going to take years to dig us all out of the sh%$ that Donald Trump has piled on us in just the past 11 days.

News You Can Use

According to Gizmodo, and I have tested it, and it works, "Add F*cking to Your Google Searches to Neutralize AI Summaries."

Useful to know, because I do not f%$#ing want Google's f%$#ing AI summaries.

They are f%$#ing inaccurate and even more f%$#ing annoying than than they are f%$#ing inaccurate. 

If you are tired of Google’s AI-powered search results leading you astray with poor information from bad sources, there is some good news. It turns out that if you include any expletives in your search query, Google will not return an AI Overview, as they are called, at the top of the results page.

For instance, if you search “How large is the student body of Yale University?” the search results page will return a large AI-generated blurb above the blue links. If you instead search, “How large is the f%$#ing student body at Yale University?” you will instead get a standard list of blue link results, sans-AI summary.
(%$# mine)

As an FYI, damn, hell, and the C-Word  (Don't use it ever) work too.