- The (so far) mistaken prophets of further financial doom
- Pulp Fiction and Google Wave
- Massive Michigan stimulus creates 400 jobs. (But what about mulitpliers? --ed In Michigan? Dividers, maybe.)
- Broadband as a civil right
Copyright © 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Michigan received $121,736,651 in federal contracts that created 405 jobs according to the same source, www.recovery.org. 405 was the jobs created or saved number for federal contracts only. That's $300,584 per job created or saved by federal contracts.
Contracts which made up a fraction of the overall stimulus dispensation.
Was this fraction 5% or 95%?
Nationally: 6.7%
I must be missing something. The link refers to a blogger who claims that 400+ jobs were created or saved. He does this by apparently assuming that the state jobs that were saved weren't actually jobs or something. His own commenters ask for a breakdown of which were salaries and which were asset purchases (as opposed to the assumption that $1.5 million accrued to each new job holder).
The whole thing looks like a hack's continued attempt to make Obama/Dems/bailouts/stimuli/ . . . look bad.
What a surprise that it was cited.
...I was surprised as well. It took about two minutes of additional searches to figure out something was wrong with the numbers.
It's bizarre we're even talking about "created or saved" jobs as though this metric isn't some vague euphemism Obama just invented this year.
One wonders why no one publicly discusses how to detect how many jobs are saved.
"Jobs saved". Sounds like the Dems learned this from the mega retailers from their TV ad pitch where they claim "the more you shop, the more you save". They must be brainwashed into believing that the "the more government spends, the more jobs get saved."
I'm quite sure there's a well tested formula some place.
Not exactly psyched about the notion of broadband as a civil right.
That's because you're a bigot.
This is what happens in societies where the government provides us our "rights". It's a really backwards way of thinking about the concept of rights, but it demonstrates these people have no clue what a right is. I spend a lot of time in Austria, and I see the politicians lately promising that it should be a right of the people to have trains running 24 hours a day on the weekends.
I actually feel a bit sorry for the people who feel it is their "right".
This shouldn't be a newsflash, but if the government has to tax someone else and provide it to you, it's not your "right".
This shouldn't be a newsflash, but if the government has to tax someone else and provide it to you, it's not your "right".
Sad that something so intrinsically obvious even has to be pointed out.
This shouldn't be a newsflash, but if the government has to tax someone else and provide it to you, it's not your "right".
Really? Wow. So if, for example, you are poor and don't make enough to pay taxes, or if you've been out of work for the last year because of a crappy economy, you shouldn't get police protection? You shouldn't have the right to an attorney? You shouldn't be allowed due process, because all that hoopla costs money? Hey, I work in a different city than I live in, so I don't pay any taxes to the city that I work in -- perhaps I shouldn't get police protection while I'm there, since I'm not contributing to that city's police department?
I'm going to assume that you didn't bother to think for the 3 seconds it would have taken for you to come up with these, instead of assuming that you think that anyone with less money than you should have no rights at all. Because the first one just makes you thoughtless, while the second marks you as both offensive and insane. And an extremist libertarian. (But I repeat myself.)
-fred
Keep two things in mind
1. It's Europe. They do silly things there, like write a monkey bill of rights.
2. They are saying that access to broadband is a civil right. About the only effect I can see is that judges will no longer be able to make staying off the Internet a condition of porole. It happens but it's rare.
Unfortunately, I was not one of the lucky 6 from RI. I have a good feeling about the next $Trillion stimulus, though.
Roubini did not consider that fed actions would raise stock prices without reflecting an increase in producing capital. In this sense, what the government is doing is totally working. They could make the DOW go to 30,000 easily if they went all Gideon Gono on it.
Maybe the DOW and New York financial firms are a reflection of the economy just as, oh, the Vancouver Stock Exchange is a reflection of that economy.
The media, and politicians when it is positive will still make that connection. They are stupid.
Does anyone who needs to raise money to invest in building or growing their enterprise go through New York anymore? Or do they make other arrangements.
Derek
Broadband access as a civil right probably works in areas where the population is fairly concentrated, and the country is fairly small. The US, being somewhat larger than Finland, would have some trouble with the infrastructure. At least in the near term, and for the 20% (highly approximate figure (from my tail end)) of the population that lives in rural areas.
OTOH, it's a guarantee of access, not paid service.
On the gripping hand, if you look at like mail, access to the postal service is certainly considered a right by most of us. People certainly get upset of the post office refuses to deliver mail to them.