Economy held back by 44,000 job losses

THE WASHINGTON TIMES ^ | August 02, 2003 | Patrice Hill

[harpseal]

For a person to be collecting unemployment they must be aable and available for work and actively seeking work. It is only after unemployment benefirs are exhausted that they are subject to being counted as unemployed. The survey method is the way the government gets those numbers. I was not saying or implying exhaustion of Unemployment benefits automatically meant that a person was dropped from teh roills merely that it is part of the criteria.

[Edit35]

**They could have made the headline read "Unemployment Plunges!" but they were concerned about workers who left the labor force. Of course if that was true, why did make such a fuss about the 6.4 number last month when workers were entering the labor force?**

Are you that dumb normally or do you have to work at it?
_________________________

Dave S, I understand that statement completely. If the number counters are so clairvoyant that they fudge the numbers because "people are discouraged," then why aren't they so clairvoyant when more people join the workforce.

Besides, it seems to me that many people just sit on unemployment compensation until it runs out, because they are reluctant to get another job or perhaps switch their line of work.

Please don't flame me. It's true. I see it all the time, right within my own circle of friends and family.
We have become a somewhat spoiled society, with many people demanding the exact same job as the one they just lost.

[JustAnAmerican]

Unless I miss my guess here, did not the two thirteen week extentions for unemployment expire around the middle of July? And If that is the case,since these figures do not include these folks as Unemployed, isn't the government playing a numbers game to make things look rosey?

And just in case I haven't mentioned it, thanks for the pings.

[Jeff Head]

Discouragement at finding few jobs prompted more than a half-million job seekers to drop out of the labor force, causing a drop in the unemployment rate to 6.2 percent from 6.4 percent in June.

Huh? Fuzzy math? 1/22 million job seekers stopped looking, so that helped unemployment?

What a bunch of smoke and mirrors. The wool is being pulled down tight over folks eyes here.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Good question. Usually the WashTimes is better than this.

[stylin19a]

Good Grief...you cut & paste faster than i post a link. I gotta get DSL.

The sampling is like a weight scale that is set a couple pounds off either way. You may not know your exact weight, but you can accurately track the fluctuations in your weight.

thanx again

[harpseal]

What a bunch of smoke and mirrors. The wool is being pulled down tight over folks eyes here.

There is a myth that the only thing that matters economically is the perception. Thus if everyone just believes the economy will be wonderful. Unfortunately there are a whole lot of hard working fellow Americans who can no longer be employed in their most productive capacity due to government policies encouraging jobs in nations other than the USA. That encouragement is not the legitimate constitutional role of the Federal government and is diametrically opposed to the US Constitution and the original intent of the framers.

[Jeff Head]

But a perception based on falsehood is one that will come crashing down at some point. These mirrors are going to develop some very nasty shards when they come apart.

I pray to God daily that we can get some statesmen and true patriots in positions of authority, who will stand up and do the right thing...I get involved to the best of my ability (and probably more than what is financially best for my family) in trying to influence things in that direction.

I hope and believe that millions of others are doing likewise...and I KNOW that God in Heaven will not let that effort, and that cry go unanswered.

Best regards my friend.

[harpseal]

Reality has a nasty way of intuding on fantasy.

[samuel_adams_us]

Hello All:
There is a quote in the Sunday Denver Post by the president of an outsourcing company called Technology Crafters:

“There’s a lot of interest,” said Robert Welch, the company’s president. “American software teams are awesome for innovation, but in terms of being able to crank things out in a productive manner, they’re no the best on the planet.”


I find this quotation completely laughable! What a joke! If the Indian software companies were held to the same high standards that the software companies in the United States are held to, their prices for labor and product would be the same. A good example would be that a customer product takes 10,000 lines of “C” code in order to provide the customer with the amount of functionality they need. The Indian programmer writes the code and the documentation in order to install and use this piece of software. The Indian’s American counterpart writes the 10,000 lines of code, the documentation to support the installation and use of the software and he/she will also write the ISO9001 documentation required to go along with the software product which includes the project planning document, the software design document, the software testing documentation, the architecture review board documentation, etc. As you can see it’s obvious who takes more time to produce their product and who does a more careful and a better job. So just how many Indian software companies are ISO9001 certified? I wonder! American IT management would like their customers to think the quality is the same but underneath it all, we all really know the truth.
Let me relay an actual customer event that took place recently, a large Swiss Bank found an operating system defect on their system while trying to write an application to produce custom graphics for their bank statement printing. The function they found the bug in was wcstombs which converts wide character set strings to multibyte character set strings. Anyway this customer was/is paying for 24 X 7 development support and called into the 1-800 number and talked with a support engineer here in the United States. The customer was told that the engineers where looking at it and that they would be updated every morning until the fix was shipped. The software these days is written in India, it was Friday morning here in the United States, the Indian programmers don’t work weekends or overtime and are not required to be called out even if there is a customer emergency. The support representative from the United States called the customer on Saturday morning, Sunday Morning, Monday morning, always telling the customer that the engineers were working on the fix even though they weren’t. The customer finally received their fix the following Thursday afternoon, thus making the delivery of their bank statements late and costing them a lot of extra money for shipping, etc. Previous to this instance that same software had been written here in the United States, the customer would call in on Friday morning and a real software engineers was working on it within the hour, a test fix was usually supplied before the weekend was out and the customer would have shipped their statements on time. Now if you were that customer, would you be happy with your 24 X 7 development support?
I have one last comment, I find it interesting that a Japanese company named Toyota can produce a superior car with American workers and the CEO only earns 1.5 million dollars a year and an American company named GM pays their CEO 30 million dollars a year, uses foreign labor and produces cars with twice the number of defects per thousand cars shipped. I personally believe that the real problem in this country is the inept management running our companies, they cost more, create more headaches and redtape and then pass the blame down to the engineers and those doing the real work.
When will it stop? Enron continues to go on and on and on, this time the management is pushing the blame on the engineers and replacing them with foreign workers when the real responsibility and problem lies with them, they are the ones who agreed to all the extra work for the products, not the engineers and yet they take no responsibility for their own actions. And lastly, you think the stockholders will see any of the benefits from these costs savings via a dividend? Or do you think the execs will give each other bonuses?