So, at what point do Republicans start saying “Well, unemployment is at 5.0% and we’re creating 271,000 jobs a month because the country clearly anticipates total Republican control of the country in 2017.”
The October jobs report was a blowout.
Data out Friday morning showed that the US economy added 271,000 jobs in October. It was the strongest pace of employment growth this year, and nearly 100,000 jobs more than the consensus forecast for 182,000.
The unemployment rate dropped to 5%, the lowest level since 2008. Economists consider a 5% rate to indicate full employment. The labor force participation rate stayed at a 38-year low, with just 62.4% of American civilians over the age of 16 working or looking for work.
Average hourly earnings grew by 0.4% month-on-month, better than forecast.
The report had been expected to show a modest rise in the pace of jobs growth, following the unexpected slump we saw over the last two months. In Friday’s report, September nonfarm payrolls were revised even lower to 137,000 from 142,000.
So yeah, September was something of an aberration, but October was BEAST MODE. Fed rate hike in December looking like it’s going to be on.
Open thread.
benw
Oh, yeah? Well K-thug dumps gasoline all over your BEAST MODE and lights it on fire!
TG Chicago
So it looks like that Russian plane that exploded mid-air very well might have been brought down by a bomb.
The next time a warmonger yells about how Obama needs to “take the lead” in Syria, I hope they’re asked why the U.S. needs to “take the lead” in becoming a target for terrorism.
If Russia wants to send all their blood and treasure into Syria all for the privilege of being ISIS’ #1 terrorism target, then why should we get in the way?
Sherparick
Yep, and some of my trepidation about such a rate hike has been eased reports like this tend to start a “virtuous cycle” as businesses start to invest in new products and equipment to meet what they expect his higher demand, and particularly housing may see a burst in residential investment come Spring as more people with more and better jobs come into a market that had been depressed for 8 years (even with the uptick in housing starts the last few years, the numbers were still no better than what had been the bottom of past cycles (1982-83 and 1990-93) when U.S. Population was 50 million less.
I expect Squint, Driftglass’ name for Joe Scarborough http://driftglass.blogspot.com/, was very subdued and unhappy seeing Obama, that job destroying Democrat, set all sorts of records in consecutive months of job creation.
Thoughtful Today
Erm… A couple of hard truths:
Real unemployment runs twice what’s reported.
271,000 new jobs in a single month is approximately what’s required to keep up with population growth.
Punchy
Nice, warm, sunnny day. Got to work and the power is out. No storms anywhere. No fracking or strong winds in the area. But power is down because reasons.
Infrastructure spending, how the fuck does it work?
Omnes Omnibus
@Thoughtful Today: 271,000 new jobs in a single month is approximately what’s required to keep up with population growth.
Citation?
MattF
Tsk. It’s just sooo… challenging to get the numbers to agree with current Republican rhetoric. But they won’t stop trying, needless to say.
Vor
The GOP story is that job growth would be even better if we cut taxes for corporations and the 1%.
BGinCHI
Obviously Chicago thugs are cooking the books again.
Watchman
@Thoughtful Today: Real unemployment is more like four or five times higher than what’s being reported and 95 million people are now out of the workforce, but Balloon Juice’s constellation of all-star Zandar-level pundits are still having problems figuring out why Obamacrats keep getting their asses handed to them in state elections since 2010.
It’s a mystery!
OzarkHillbilly
@BGinCHI: Careful… the Watchman is watching, and he just knows….
p.a.
@Omnes Omnibus: Here
http://www.cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/how-many-jobs-does-it-take-to-keep-pace-with-the-growth-of-the-labor-force
is a 2011 estimate that claims 90,000/month is necessary, while mentioning that 150,000/month is the CW.
I can’t embed the link because as of today I don’t see any html buttons, and don’t remember how that one goes.
Also too, as per today’s Bonddad blog comment (at the bottom), wages are just beginning to break out their flat trend. If the Fed ^ interest rates, that’ll nip that in the bud. Thanks banksters!
I tried , around ‘just’. N.G.
scav
@Omnes Omnibus: doesn’t matter if it’s exact or not. Nothing would ever be enough for TT. An imperfect measure, consistently applied, indicates things are not worsening, but rather trending decently. But there are monthly-plucked low-hanging aren’t I smarter than all-y’all fruit to be gathered by carping about the exact measure. It was getting dull at CR well before the crash. Was far from new information and doesn’t alter the underlying signal.
Cermet
So, yes, the Fed said, kill the goose that lays the golden eggs; why? Because we need to worry about some future, non-existing issue of inflation that has no sign of occurring just so idiots who predict this occurring every month for the last tens years and were wrong will feel that their stupidity hasn’t gone unrewarded – assholes!
Sherparick
@Thoughtful Today: Not quite. Dean Baker, no right winger, has pointed out that the U.S. has to generate about 100,000 new jobs a month to keep pace with labor force growth. http://www.cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/ Of course the participation rate is still lower than it should be and U-6, the broader measure of unemployment is still near 9%, so there is still slack in the labor market. Liberals and Democrats need to celebrate these reports and say “and you really see even more good news if put us Democrats in full control of the Government.”
kc
Hey, anybody wanna talk about this? http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/u-s-plane-shot-victims-fleeing-doctors-without-borders-hospital-n457871
gene108
@MattF:
The number of people, who agree with Republican rhetoric over reality is alarmingly high. Reality and certain segments of the American public seem to have diverged over the last six years.
Fred Fnord
Wow, I’m sure glad someone told me that September was the aberration and October was obviously the trend despite looking nothing like any of the previous year (in wage growth), or I’d be worried that the Fed was going to destroy any hope of real wage growth for the bottom 75% by raising rates too early. And maybe even trigger another economic slowdown.
Glad you were there to put my mind at ease.
Frankensteinbeck
Job growth will become a Republican success the moment the GOP controls the presidency, and not before. They rely on fear to increase their voter turnout, and to depress ours.
cervantes
@Sherparick: Yabbut if we didn’t have Obamacare the unemployment rate would be negative.
BGinCHI
@Cermet: The question is “who profits?” when interest rates go up.
I’ll give you one guess.
OzarkHillbilly
Oh and I just love how there is an actual unemployment rate of 25% in the US and watchman is the only one who knows it.
Walker
@Watchman:
Shadowstats is not a reputable site. He used to claim that he was using the “old” CPI formula, but it turns out he was just making up his own CPI formula. While removal from the workforce is a real issue, you don’t make your case by citing crank sites like Shadowstats.
Iowa Old Lady
@Watchman: The population of the US is about 300 million. That includes children and retired people, who are obviously out of the work force. Are you counting them in your 95 million?
cleek
FYI,
Pie filter has been updated:
http://ok-cleek.com/blogs/?page_id=19041
Let me know if you see anything strange about it.
p.a.
Weird. I did the i, /i and it worked on mobile but not desktop.
Frankensteinbeck
@BGinCHI:
The rich have screamed and wailed every time there’s been even a hint of interest rates going up. Doesn’t that suggest that the answer is ‘not the rich’?
Tommy Young
@Punchy: Makes no sense does it. Dad texted me last night saying the same thing. Sitting in the dark, no power, no storms, just a little rain, no high winds.
My little rural town gets their power through a co-op of other small towns. 8,700 people. Two years ago the co-op said we had to upgrade our infrastructure or they wouldn’t sell us power anymore. Much related to the power lines, transformers, and stuff. Now given this is a small town and if you take two streets, Main Street and 6th street, they form almost a perfect +. On those two streets are all the major buildings, schools, businesses, you name it.
Funny thing, in about 3-4 months we dug holes, slammed poles into the ground, and pull new power lines. You look at the power lines now and all the connectors (or whatever all that stuff is called) and it looks like something out of a futuristic movie. I mean the power lines actually kind of look “high-tech.”
I’ve mentioned this here before because I think it is important. We CAN do things like this. It isn’t impossible to upgrade our infrastructure.
Another example from the past, from the first-day ground was broke at the site of the future Empire State building it took us exactly one year to build it. Ponder that for a few. How long did it take for us to rebuild the WTC? We can do these type of things. We can wire this nation with fiber. Heck my town has a fiber backbone thanks to money from The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (built right down Main and 6th). We can upgrade our power grid. We can do anything we want if we just want to do it darn it.
OK rant ended, but this is an issue, maybe more than just about any, that I get really fired up about!
Matt McIrvin
@Watchman: Shadow Stats is a crackpot site. I’ve been trying to figure out what the hell that guy’s alternate unemployment measure is for a while now, and as far as I can tell, it’s just something designed to track real fluctuations fairly closely until Obama takes office, and then go nuts.
People sometimes claim it’s undoing the change in unemployment reporting that happened during the Clinton administration, but that’s not it. The previous figure was U-5, which tracks the top-line U-3 figure fairly closely, just a little higher up.
People sometimes claim it’s U-6, but that also tracks fluctuations in U-3, just signficantly higher up than U-5.
The best argument you can likely make for things not getting better is to look at the labor force participation rate, but Shadow Stats’ measure isn’t that either, since that’s been getting worse since about 1999, and Shadow Stats shows a job recovery under George W. Bush.
My conclusion is, it’s cooked-up hackwork.
Just on the face of it, it’s obviously missing something. It claims that unemployment is worse now than it was in 2009. Direct personal experience says that’s wrong. I was unemployed in 2009 and it was frickin’ terrifying. Most of my former co-workers were also unemployed or underemployed at low-paying contract gigs. They’re not now. Now maybe we’re unrepresentative of the country as a whole, but the official rate actually tracks my own experience much more closely.
BGinCHI
@Frankensteinbeck: Banksters.
Iowa Old Lady
With the baby boomers retiring, I believe the labor participation rate will drop for a while.
Ryan
@Thoughtful Today: Pretty sure the consensus is 100k a month.
https://www.frbatlanta.org/chcs/calculator.aspx?panel=1
Luthe
The BLS U6 rate is 9.8%. Nowhere near as terrible as TT would have it, but still not great. As one of the unemployed, I would like it lower, but that’s a personal thing.
My question is, what kind of jobs are these? Crappy service jobs or actual full-time with benefits jobs?
Richard Mayhew
@Thoughtful Today: bullshit
I believe you are referencing u6 instead of headline u3 as “real” unemployment. U6 measures underemployment. Both are real, they measure different concepts. U3 is the traditional unemployment metric and it tends to correlate well enough with the other u series.
Secondly population growth requires between 90,000 to 120,000 jobs per month. This is a big net new job ex population number no matter how you slice it.
You don’t get to make up new concepts and disregard evidence to make a poorly argued point. We’re not Republican primary voters here.
BGinCHI
You know, honestly, I’d feel better if trolls came here and made good points about serious issues like unemployment, wages, work, etc.
There are good reasons to disagree about this stuff.
But jesus fuck, all you get are people who have no grasp of reality. No sense of how statistics, economics, science, and so on, work. They just read some shit somewhere or heard it on the one new program they watch and that’s it. Done.
jeffreyw
I was EPU’d in the last post, so I’ll drop this link to a formatting toolbar extension for Firefox again, here.
Just One More Canuck
@Thoughtful Today: @Omnes Omnibus: Actually, 271,000 is about 30% above the rate to cover the population growth rate (321 million x pop growth rate of .77 (per wiki) = 205,000 per month. Without getting issues about the quality of the jobs, what they pay and whether they are full time or part time, a job increase 30% above the rate needed to meet population growth is pretty good by the metric that Thoughtful Today is setting.
Chyron HR
@Thoughtful Today:
Great, we got hit with a Neutron Tom: Destroys the website but leaves Thoughtful Today standing.
Ryan
@BGinCHI: Require citations! That way, others can weigh the cited evidence, or what purports to be evidence.
rikyrah
And, what would the UER be if we hadn’t of had one political party that CHOSE to commit ECONOMIC TREASON against this country beginning January 20, 2009?
JPL
@Iowa Old Lady: Because of access to affordable health care, you will see some retiring earlier. I am not sure why the news media ignores that fact.
Satby
@JPL: Exactly. I know several people who jumped ship as soon as they could get pre-Medicare health insurance. They were only hanging on to jobs they hated because otherwise at 59-65 they’d potentially be uninsured.
rikyrah
What would the UER be if:
1. Those GOP Governors hadn’t of shedded those public sector jobs..
2. The President’s Jobs Bill was passed?
These questions should be brought up by Democrats…that they don’t….
Damn, they suck as teammates.
scav
But but! IQ is a poor measure! That means there are no smart people, ever, and moreover little Annalise totally did not learn her 7s multiplication tables yesterday!
Tommy Young
@JPL: And as smart liberals have noted many others started working for themselves. I was already working for myself, but before the Affordable Care Act my health care costs were out of control as a single dude. If I had a wife and children I know I couldn’t have afforded not to have the stellar, almost 100% employer provided healthcare I had in the past.
I have not seen stats but I think it is safe to say maybe millions of people quit their “day jobs” to follow their dream of owning their own business. Taking a hobby or something they love doing and trying to turn it into a business.
There is a lot to be said for any law our Congress passes making something like that happen/possible!
Matt McIrvin
@Iowa Old Lady: I looked at that a while back too… but boomer retirement isn’t the whole explanation for the current dropping labor force participation rate.
http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_303.htm
You can see that by looking at the age distribution. Labor force participation for people over 55 is actually rising, and for younger people it’s dropping like a stone. (If the latter weren’t true, you could still have dropping overall participation just because the whole population is getting older, and moving into cohorts with lower participation even if those low numbers are rising. But labor force participation for young people is dropping.)
That says to me that some of the disconnect between labor force participation and unemployment is people in their teens and twenties delaying entering the workforce at all. They don’t count as discouraged workers because they were never workers in the first place. They’re staying in school, or living in their parents’ basements, or something like that.
Is this good or bad? Well, some of both, I suppose. They may well be discouraged by a slack labor market for young people, and their burden of educational debt increases. But it also probably means we get a more educated population.
Meanwhile, the boomers aren’t retiring, at least not as much as people that age used to. They may not be able to afford to retire until later.
PurpleGirl
@Tommy Young: I congratulate you and your town for upgrading the power infrastructure. That is something we do need to do nationally and nobody wants to do it because of how costly it will be. And we lose power in the transmission of power because of it.
I’ve said, like forever, that we have the resources but we don’t have the will.
(And the difference in building the World Trade Center(s) and the Empire State Building is that the construction methods were somewhat different, the buildings of the WTC taller and this time around needed more security built in. Also, too, the bedrock is different and the WTC required more site preparation (especially sealing off the hole with the bathtub from water seepage from ground water and underground rivers in the areas).
ETA: What is really amazing about the Empire State Building, is the construction started just as the depression started and the owners decided to go ahead anyway to build it.
benw
@BGinCHI: are you referring to our trolls here on BJ in general, or Ben Carson specifically? :)
debbie
@Iowa Old Lady:
Do they take into account that some people drop out of the workforce to go back to school?
Tommy Young
@PurpleGirl: First off I know the Empire State Build and the WTC are not close to apple to apple, but I still find it telling.
That is as spot on as any comment ever will be here. And it my EXACT same feeling. We have the resources. We have the people with the skills and who want the work BTW. Heck we could find the money if we wanted (pretty much zero interest rates for banks — give that to cities, counties, and states). All we lack it seems is the will, which I find both pretty darn sad and depressing.
The Pale Scot
So what the hell do I need to do after I’ve clicked on the link in a comment to see what it was in response and I want to go back to where I was reading comments?
No worries, I just need to notice the number of the comment that I’m leaving, and scroll back to it.
Oh right…..
scav
@rikyrah:
Matt McIrvin
@Luthe: Right. The thing about U-6 is, while it’s always worse than U-3, it goes up and down in lockstep with U-3, so when people make doomy statements about how the whole recovery is a fraud (without outright lying) they need to use something else. Generally it’s either labor force participation, or something more opaque.
Tommy Young
@The Pale Scot: Hit the “tab” key …..
Matt McIrvin
@Tommy Young: It’s quite possible that “we” in some popular-majority sense do have the will to rebuild and improve the national infrastructure for power, transportation, etc.
But people who will reject and deny the will with their dying breath have control of too many veto points.
proterozoic
“Unemployment is secretly higher. What about U6, huh? This is meaningless, the labor participation rate is still low. Thanks to Obama, average incomes have stagnated and inequality is higher!” etc etc
Gin & Tonic
@Tommy Young: There was a pretty lengthy discussion of this last night in one of the open threads, about how that functionality is different from what we had before, and not in a good way. I know you’ve got a lot going on, but you may want to review that to understand user concerns.
MattF
Ah. The NYT made my day– there’s an article by Bill Grimes. For those who may be unaware, Grimes is a former Times restaurant critic and a spectacularly good writer. The article published today is a ‘review’ of an exhibit at the Museum of Natural History about the human microbiome and it’s hilarious.
NonyNony
@Richard Mayhew: Watchman is Zandar’s stalker. He used to like pie, but it appears that I may need to be doing something new with my pie filter post upgrade. (ETA – just checked – new version of pie filter has been released. Watchman once again advocates for tasty pies.)
@Tommy Young: Okay you’ve now fixed my one and only issue that I’d discovered with the site upgrade – the inability to use the back button to go back to where I was when I followed a comment thread back up the chain. Thanks!
benw
@Chyron HR: yikes! So if I don’t feel the Bern, I’m going to burn? There’s only one choice then:
SANDERS/LUCIFER 2016
feebog
@Tommy Young: I think baby boomers retirement has had a much greater impact on the labor participation rate than economists realize. The “baby boomer” generation was born between 1946 and 1960. Those on the early side of that period have already retired. Many more retired earlier than they expected or wanted to due to the recession, but they are never the less retired and are not returning to the workforce. And yes, some folks, like you and I are lucky enough to be in professions where we can own our own business and be our own boss. There is no doubt the ACA has helped people in our situation, but I’m not sure it’s multiples of millions. Certainly a factor though.
Mandalay
http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/06/politics/ben-carson-responds-violent-past-new-day/index.html
Accepting that we all probably misremember events from our youth, that story from Carson really looks like a complete fabrication. If you try to stab someone there is no way you confuse “classmate” and “close relative”.
You might get the year wrong, or not recall exactly the events leading up to the attack, but you would never ever forget who you tried to stab. Unless you made the whole thing up.
Omnes Omnibus
@benw: No way Lucifer takes the VP nom. Have you not read Milton?
shell
@Punchy: \How my power company usually explains it: A problem in a substation, or a squirrel chewed thru a wire.
Gin & Tonic
@Tommy Young: The discussion I was referring to is here: https://balloon-juice.com/2015/11/05/open-thread-1917/#comment-5547299
amk
@Tommy Young:
“Hit the “tab” key”
so, what crime did the back key commit to get kicked out?
Matt McIrvin
Here’s an interesting slideshow about long-term unemployment:
http://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2015/long-term-unemployment/
When the economy’s worse, a larger proportion of unemployed people are long-term unemployed, as you might well guess. But the fraction is dropping. This seems to be primarily a problem for older workers, and it also seems to be more urban than rural. So it’s a different social problem than some of the others we’ve been talking about.
Eric U.
I’m glad someone asked, the fact that the back button no longer did that was driving me nuts
Although I like a button better because I am usually reading BJ with a beer in one hand and can only use the mouse with the other
Matt McIrvin
@feebog: I had a long post on this that is held in moderation apparently because I put a link to a source in it, but I think that’s not the whole story. The boomers are actually retiring later than previous cohorts did (I think more can’t afford to retire), and labor force participation is rising for people over 55. Meanwhile, it’s dropping rapidly for people in their teens and twenties.
You could still definitely have a decrease in participation from the whole population graying. But I think a significant part of the drop in labor force participation is actually young people delaying entering the workforce entirely. They don’t make unemployment claims, and they never were workers so they don’t count as discouraged workers. They’re in school or just living with their parents.
gene108
@Tommy Young:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_World_Trade_Center
Took close to a decade to build 1WTC, but I gotta feeling there’s a lot more bells and whistles in 1WTC than the Empire State building. Also, had a few more issues getting the old building’s remains cleared and the site ready for construction.
Tommy Young
@Matt McIrvin: No you are right there. Here is what my town has done in the last 5 years:
– Built a new $60M high school (bonds)
– Built new admin offices for the school district (bonds)
– Put in a fiber optic backbone (money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act)
– Gave small tax breaks so Boeing and Monsanto (two companies I hate BTW) came to town
– Rewired our power infrastructure (cash we had one hand — my town runs a large surplus)
– Put new water mains and fire hydrants down Mainstreet (cash we had one hand)
– Funded a TV/radio campaign asking people in the area to come “shop local” here (cash we had one hand)
– Hired and paid local artists to create art for downtown in conjunction with the “shop local” campaign (cash we had one hand)
Oh and we only raised taxes once on businesses, a small property tax increase (my town is still the LOWEST in the County), and did a bond for the school (in an election we voted 57% for McCain we voted 63% for the bond).
The next thing my town wants to do, and they are trying to determine the lawsuits companies like Verizon will bring, is to offer free WIFI for the entire town. They figure it will improve the quality of life, make more people want to move here (more property taxes), and more companies locate here (yet more taxes). I guess we will see what happens.
benw
@Tommy Young: in my personal experience there’s a ton of smart, hard-working people here in the US, including a new generation of unemployed people desperate to start up the employment ladder. The problem seems to be that there’s too much intransigence on the conservative side to initiate and fund the projects. Because underfund the infrastructure, bitch about how the roads, etc. suck, and use that as an excuse to cut more funding is a phase locked loop that wins Republicans a lot of elections, even though it hurts America. Fuck them!
I also think its funny that now the second you show up, half of us ignore your actual comment and start peppering you with redesign questions. Fuck us!
Anywho, here’s mine (I hope it’s easy): can the side-scrolly-bar thing on the right of the screen not be very, very light grey? Like maybe black instead?
TriassicSands
“So, at what point do Republicans start saying…”
The problem is that if the economy is doing fairly well, the voters won’t be concerned about turning the reins over to supply siders who always promise lower taxes. Our ignorant electorate is killing us.
Mike J
Republicans look at this picture and see two unemployed deadbeats.
Josie
@Tommy Young: Tried that – the tab key takes me to the end of the thread.
Recovering bonsai
@Tommy Young: On my tablet, the tab key only shows up when the keyboard does–that is, when you’re typing something. If you’re simply reading comments, as many people do, ‘hit the tab key’ isn’t helpful advice for navigating replies. Steeplejack’s explanation in a previous thread of how the back button worked would be well worth your time to read. Okay. Back to lurking.
Matt McIrvin
@rikyrah: It’s amazing to think where we would be now if public-sector employment had taken up the slack in labor demand, as it did in every single post-recession recovery prior to this one.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mike J: I am apparently forbidden to look at it. 403 error.
Davebo
@Tommy Young:
Rebuilding a grid with power poles is so short sighted IMO. If, in 2015 a community decides to put money into that as opposed to underground is not thinking long term.
The Other Chuck
The smooth-scrolling to comments when clicked is not only annoying when there’s hundreds of comments, it also doesn’t appear in history. Basically it’s degraded for a dubious visual effect. I guess I’m going to have to write a JS version of Better Balloon Juice to unfuck things now.
Amir Khalid
@benw:
I think that scroll bar’s part of your browser.
benw
@Omnes Omnibus: I still quote Lucifer’s “I do not remember a time when I was not like I am now” logic as to why he is equal to God from time to time. But that was Lucifer raising himself to the level of Himself, and we are talking about BERNIE SANDERS here. I think the horned one would jump at the veep slot.
Mike J
@Omnes Omnibus: Try this one. Same idea.
tazj
@rikyrah: This angers me also. They’ve let the Republicans successfully demonize public sector workers and never bring up the fact that the President proposed jobs bills that would really put people back to work and improve our crumbling infrastructure.
Public sector employment increased under both Reagan and G.W. Bush and helped decrease the unemployment rate but these are facts Republicans conveniently forget. I love how Paul Krugman calls them deficit fetishists, because that’s exactly what they are now. They’re obsessed about the deficit but unconcerned about people’s actual lives.
benw
@Amir Khalid: but the color seems to be set by the website? For example, the scroll bar is dark grey at the NYTimes or Wikipedia and I can tell at a glance where I am when I scroll, but here it’s white/very, very light grey.
The Gray Adder
I thought the usual narrative was (1) the BLS is lying through their teeth because Cousin Bubba is still out of work, or (2) the low labor participation rate clearly indicates that people have given up on the Obamaconomy (and has nothing at all to do with Boomers retiring in large numbers) or (3) U3 doesn’t tell the whole story. Anticipation of President Trump/Carson/Whoeverthefark is a new one on me.
MomSense
@Gin & Tonic:
What if I didn’t like what we had before and prefer things now?
I just don’t engage in the endless discussions about the changes in the site because it seems a little over the top to me.
Oh well. I’m going outside for a walk.
Matt McIrvin
@tazj: Deficit fetishists when the President is a Democrat, and dishonestly too, because raising taxes is forever and always off the table; it’s all about cutting services. Get a Republican in, and suddenly Reagan taught us deficits don’t matter.
Iowa Old Lady
@debbie: Or stay home to take care of children, or are imprisoned, or disabled. The 95 million figure is just silly.
amk
@benw:
“its funny that now the second you show up, half of us ignore your actual comment and start peppering you with redesign questions. Fuck us!”
may be if tommy completed the job he was assigned (or volunteered, whatever) instead of just leaving it as an half-assed attempt, then us thankless fuckers won’t bother him.
Tommy Young
@amk: LOL. Nothing. Different WordPress themes work in different ways.
@Gin & Tonic: Frankly I have never used this site nor any site like that. I will be the first to admit I’ve looked into it and I understand how it works, but to be blunt, I am not even sure how I’d hack the PHP files to make that functionality of the “old” site appear here. So the chances of that coming back, very low.
@benw: Yeah, I was kind of really hoping to talk about you know, politics and stuff. But I guess for the rest of my time here this is always going to be a “thing.” The reason, and you might not agree, it seems few here do with me anymore, they are a light color is two-fold. One, so they don’t take over the site and slap you in the face. Two, so when you do mouse over them they can change to a much darker/stronger color.
There are about 7-10 edits I still need to make. Almost all of them are direct requests from users, two of them pretty major. The rest from John, much smaller stuff. Then we are pretty much done. But we are having some server issues. Seems anytime I “touch” something it either totally crashes the server for the Front Pagers or it comes down for a few minutes. Earlier it did this, but also took down the front end. So once the “backend” people figure that out, I’ll pound out the change in the next day or so.
Put up a Post here with all we’ve done and see what happens. Clearly I won’t make everybody happy, but as I’ve said time and time again that is impossible. And as many noted in the last day or so after I started screaming it, just because you want a change doesn’t mean you are going to get it (which it seemed many thought they would), because this is John’s site and not yours.
Then in a couple weeks the BIG thing happens. A totally new commenting system. Let me say that again, a totally new commenting system!!!! We could put it up now, but I learn from my mistakes. We are working with the developer to tweak it and to bring in things you want, like numbered comments (which it doesn’t have now, but will). A lot of other stuff like that. Trust me the difference, both in functionality and appearance will be a night and day difference (in a good way I expect). But we’re not going to put it up, like we did with the last one, until we are 100% happy with it, because again from experience, I’ve found many here can’t seem to grasp the concept of a “placeholder” and the phrase “we’re working on it.” So there is that ………
OK, can we please, please, please for the love of God not talk about the site anymore and let me enjoy myself a little with my iced coffee and talk of how dumb Republicans are? Please!
The Gray Adder
@Sherparick: Aaaand, that’s the trifecta (see my other post, just about this one). That didn’t take long.
MomSense
@rikyrah:
The Republicans have been intentionally sabotaging the U.S. economy as much as possible as an electoral strategy to gain seats in the House and Senate. Thanks to a complicit media, tons of corporate cash, emo progressives who were too “disappointed” to vote in 2010 and 2014, and a bunch of stupid people this strategy has been wildly successful.
Amir Khalid
@benw:
There’s a scroll bar like the one you describe on the right-hand edge of my laptop screen too (I use Firefox). It’s the same shade of light grey here and at the NYT’s front page.
NorthLeft12
@Watchman: Yes, I think I see…..because Republicans win all these state elections, that must mean that the policies they espouse are correct and the best for the vast majority of people. Why else would people vote for them?
I never realized what faith you have in democracy. The people are never wrong and will always vote for what is best for them.
Just One More Canuck
@Tommy Young: Thanks Tommy
SiubhanDuinne
@The Pale Scot:
Why not just note the time of the comment you’re replying to?
Or even easier, when your comment posts, just touch the nym of the person you’re replying to and it will automatically take you back. That feature works better for me now than it did before the change.
JPL
@Tommy Young: But… just kidding
lurker dean
@Tommy Young: at least on firefox, the tab button only lets you step back once. so it’s not really helpful if you’ve clicked through several responses to follow a conversation, and want to go back to where you started. the old browser back button worked as many times as you needed and let you go all the way back. i may have missed it but hopefully work is progressing on fixing the browser back button.
yeah, i know threaded conversations would eliminate the need, but like many here i dislike them. i prefer the stream of consciousness of the current format.
burnspbesq
@Thoughtful Today:
“Real unemployment runs twice what’s reported”
I don’t suppose you’d care to provide some actual data to support that wingnut talking point.
You would have been better off suggesting that the low labor force participation rate is evidence that Obama has degraded our purity of essence.
Hoodie
@benw: That mentality is not limited to the public sector. Cost cutting and other forms of “creative destruction” have become a religion. Thing is, there often is nothing created after the destruction, and the destroyer walks away with a handsome severance package. It’s the GOP form of corporate governance.
Tommy Young
@lurker dean: And I am aware of that, it only takes you back once.
Gin & Tonic
@Tommy Young: I’m sure if you post the specifics of the coffee you’re drinking, you’ll spark a lengthy discussion about how you should have picked/roasted/ground/brewed it better.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gin & Tonic: Tea is better for him.
Thoughtful Today
…
“U6” labor statistics, if you’re in that category, are very real.
Population growth conflicts with labor gains. I’m grateful it’s not as bad as I recalled.
Thank you to those that pulled up citations.
Anyone have a link to EPI’s report that breaks down unemployment and underemployment by age and race?
PurpleGirl
@Tommy Young: That’s why I replied with my comment about NYC building and the power grid stuff. I figured you wanted to just talk about normal stuff. Hope other people take up the challenge now — here’s to normal stuff!!!
(When I worked as a paralegal, I was in the Public Utilities department of the firm and worked specifically with power issues and rate cases. Very esoteric stuff. I didn’t work on communications and telephone issues, though.)
The Gray Adder
@Luthe: Historical data on U6 going back to 2005: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS13327709
Before the recession, it was generally in the eights. 9.8 is high, yes, but the trend is in the right direction. From the looks of it, barring any further catastrophe (like Ben Carson getting elected President), we’ll be back in the low eights by the end of next year.
benw
@Amir Khalid: I’m using Chrome on a MacBook Pro and it’s white here and dark grey most other places. Could it be a Chrome thing? Should I blame Google instead of Tommy? GET OUTTA HERE!
Tommy Young
@lurker dean:
I honestly have no idea what we are going to do with threaded vs. non-threaded comments, which I think will surprise some here that don’t like this design because they think I think I know everything and am not open to change (which is not true BTW).
I’ve been chatting on the Internet since before there was the WWW and it was done via email or bulletin boards.
I personally like threaded comments. I find it strange this site doesn’t use them. Or that people have to figure out their own ways to navigate through the comments. But it is pretty much crystal clear to me the vast majority of people, or at least that weigh in on the topic, are so against threaded comments with a passion of a blazing hot sun.
And I am not going to turn them on just because I want them. I’ve been here too many hours and written thousands of comments without threaded comments and gotten along just fine. This might be something other folks ponder when there is this “little” thing here or there you don’t like.
Nested or threaded comments might just be a “bridge too far.”
gene108
@rikyrah:
Democrats tried.
But it is hard to attack someone over a hypothetical result.
There are two problems here. The first is the result of any jobs bill will not be known until after the bill is enacted and the results, even if beneficial can fall short of expectations. This happened with the ARRA. It is hard to demonize an opponent over a bunch of “what ifs”. “If my opponent had not opposed the Jobs Bill, we may have seen greater job growth.”
Not an easy attack ad to write, as compared to “My opponent voted to raise taxes 2 Million times, while in office”.
The second is looking like a wuss. If you can’t get your way, complaining that the other party are a bunch of “meanie poo-poo-heads” because they are greedy assholes just does not come off well, especially with our media that is primed to punch down onto anyone showing signs of weakness or metaphysical injury from not being in a strong public position.
There’s also something else going in with the electorate that I really do not understand, which is actual results of government – local, state or federal – are no longer a basis for voters to decide which way to vote.
I’m old enough to remember, when you could pound an incumbent on dismal economic performance or poor fiscal management and probably win, but that is no longer the case.
I’m not exactly sure why though.
Bill Arnold
@Tommy Young:
Re the new yet-to-be commenting system, (1) will old comments be preserved and accessible? (2) I am presuming that it will continue to be non-threaded (comment threading is an abomination) and hoping that it has a lot less gratuitous, useless whitespace (both vertical whitespace, and right/left margins. Currently reading with a 6 point font just to fit more text on the screen.
skerry
At 11:45 Pres Obama will reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline permit request, you can probably watch the announcement here:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/live
Tommy Young
@Gin & Tonic: Aeropress is the best coffee maker in the world, well that doesn’t cost a few thousands dollars. Far better than my Chemex. There, that ought to piss off some hardcore coffee drinkers :).
Patricia Kayden
President Obama has had a great record when it comes to running an administration which has created millions of jobs. Democrats need to trumpet his job creation record every chance they get and stop letting Republicans get away with nonsense, false stories about how we’re all doomed.
If I recall correctly, never gonna be President Romney promised to have the unemployment rate down to 6% by 2016. Looks like we made the right choice in 2012.
Amir Khalid
Just so everyone remembers: Obama is about to make an announcement at the White House, right now. He is expected to ix-nay the Keystone Pipeline once and for all.
skerry
Not sure why I’m in moderation, but I tried to post a comment saying that President Obama is expected to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline permit request.
I included a link to the whitehouse website. Maybe that was the problem.
Anyway, good news.
benw
@Amir Khalid: huzzay!
Amir Khalid
@skerry:
Great minds think alike. I’m watching the live NBC feed at TPM, and so far all it’s showing is an empty lectern.
Oh, by the way, did anyone notice the server resetting the connection a moment ago, in response to an attempt to refresh this page? Second time tonight it’s happened to me.
Brachiator
@Watchman: RE: but Balloon Juice’s constellation of all-star Zandar-level pundits are still having problems figuring out why Obamacrats keep getting their asses handed to them in state elections since 2010.
You almost have a fair point. Republican wins at the state level seem to be more about running a death spiral of tax cuts, followed by a decline in services and the standard of living; and doubling down on regressive social policy, which also result in a decline in services and the standard of living.
But the job increases do little to stem the large scale decline and restructuring of the economy. And neither the Democrats nor the Republicans seem to have any solution for this. Wages are still stagnant, millions are unemployed or under-employed, and fewer people are required to do the jobs that have not been lost or outsourced.
ETA: The options for quoting, bolding, etc, seem to have disappeared (Running Chrome on a Windows PC)
Tommy Young
@Bill Arnold:
Now those are helpful questions and I think you will be happy with my response.
1. One we did an entire dupe of this site on our test server. All 3.5M comments and all posts before we started this redesign. We’ve already put the new commenting system on the test server, and this site will come down for 4-5 hours to do this (in a couple weeks — you will have fair warning), but yes we have successfully converted all old comment into the new system. You won’t lose a single comment. This is a very important issue for John as well.
2. We can have either, but it seems most here don’t share my love for threaded comments, so I am not going to force that on people. They will not be threaded.
3. The white space is a huge, huge issue. This darn commenting system sucks, if you were logged in as an Admin, as I am now, you’d actually see this:
https://balloon-juice.com/images/white_space_issue.png
Once we have the new system those icons will go away, and the white space will go away. Then we’ll use a much better social media plugin, Monarch, and that should “tighten” up the spacing and reduce the white space.
HRA
The jobs in this part of the year are seasonal. They are not permanent.
The Feds use the total calculations of all the state’s unemployment numbers to calculate the national unemployment rate. This does not include those who have exhausted their claims and are unemployed. Years back I had an intense conversation with our employee in charge of the statistics at our location. It made no difference.
Back to my lurking cave
lurker dean
@Tommy Young: lol, yeah, if people are hostile now, i can’t imagine how hostile they’d get if threaded comments were implemented!
as i’ve said before, i like the new format. the white space doesn’t bother me, but i don’t read BJ much on a phone. hopefully the new commenting system will be a hit.
WaterGirl
@MomSense:
@Tommy Young:
There’s a big difference between “I liked the old balloon man better” and “I lost a bunch of highly valued functionality” with the upgrade.
I find BJ almost unusable now, so I am almost never here now – between not being able to see where I am in a thread, to not being willing to click on someone’s name in a reply because I’ll have to infinitely scroll to get back to where I was, to all the bright white and too much white space that makes my eyes hurt within about 10 minutes.
You may see that as whining, but as a person who worked in IT for decades and who has rolled out many a new thing, I think this upgrade has been pretty much of a clusterfuck. And as a user on BJ, I find it pretty much unusable now, which greatly saddens me.
benw
@Hoodie: so when a GOP presidential candidate businessperson says we should run the US gov’t like a business, we should take them at face-value and assume that they’ll treat it like a *modern* venture capital takeover; not, you know, like an olde-tyme business that’s supposed to grow and prosper and employ people?
And yeah, I’m already hip to the fact that government and actual useful businesses shouldn’t be run the same way, either. But god forbid we question GOP talking points.
Tommy Young
@WaterGirl: I am very sorry to hear that.
Germy Shoemangler
CARSON PLUMMETS IN POLLS AMID REPORTS HE DID NOT STAB ANYONE
BY ANDY BOROWITZ
Carson supporters, reeling from the news that their candidate’s past might have been devoid of stabbing, have deserted his candidacy in droves.
amk
@WaterGirl: yup, it’s windows 8 clusterfuck all over.
amk
@Tommy Young:
“Different WordPress themes work in different ways.”
No, they don’t with respect to back button. I visit quite a fywp hosted sites and the back button did it was supposed to do.
WaterGirl
@Tommy Young said: “OK, can we please, please, please for the love of God not talk about the site anymore and let me enjoy myself a little with my iced coffee and talk of how dumb Republicans are? Please!”
Tommy, I am not someone who is typically a big complainer, and I am one to call people out publicly, but I feel the need to say this:
If you are doing this new website out of the goodness of your heart, fine. But if you are receiving money for this doing website, then the comment of yours that I just quoted is the most unprofessional thing I have ever seen someone in IT do or say. If you worked for me and communicated that content, and communicated that in the way that you did, you would have been fired on the spot.
I would like to know, because it will greatly affect my expectations: are you being paid for this website resign? Because I seem to recall Cole asking for funds for the “upgrade” and saying he was going to do it right by hiring a professional this time.
Tommy Young
@amk: Oh yeah, just like that.
Omnes Omnibus
Obama’s rejecting Keystone and calling for Congress to pass an infrastructure plan.
father pussbucket
Perhaps I am pointing out the bloody obvious, but it strikes me that the GOP strategy is to get the rubes so inflamed about “values” that they’ll completely ignore reality (like this).
WaterGirl
@Tommy Young: I’m glad you are sorry to hear that. Now please do something about it. Thank you.
Tommy Young
@WaterGirl:
Funny thing is you can’t fire me. Second, if somebody actually said something new in this comment thread, I would note it, as I have. But just because I am doing this site doesn’t mean, also as a long time user, that anytime I comment, even in a thread that has NOTHING to do with the site, I then have to endure a never ended set of comments saying the same thing over and over again.
amk
@Tommy Young: Did you work with microsoft by chance, dood? No proper beta testing, snarky responses to genuine feedback and they wondered why w8 was such a disaster. There is a reason they shitcanned w8 altogether. You can take it right spirit or get all hot and bothered.
MazeDancer
So, Ben Carson’s campaign admits in an email to Politico that Carson lied in his autobiography about getting accepted at West Point. (Twitter explosion as you can imagine)
Here’s Politico link: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/ben-carson-west-point-215598
Will he confess his sin and beg forgiveness so the Iowa home school devotees will still vote for him?
Does this get him off the hook for there being no actual Bible verses to cite mentioning pyramids on grain stored in same?
Really, lying about getting into West Point is going to be hard to spin as liberal media bias.
MomSense
@WaterGirl:
The site works better for me now on my mobile. It was terrible on my mobile before and mobile is my only means of using the site.
I don’t think you are whining. I’m only speaking for myself that I think the constant discussions about the site are over the top which is why I’ve been ignoring them. I realize that my experience is not everyone else’s experience.
I also prefer threaded comments. I’m clearly in the minority here.
benw
@Tommy Young:
LOL dude, 10 years and 2 site redesigns from now someone’s comment is going to get borked and their immediate thought will be “dammit, Tommy!” But don’t leave!
@WaterGirl:
this typo made me LOL, I can’t tell if it sounds sweet or sinister. But seriously, I tried the TAB key thing to jump back to a comment and it worked for me. Hope that helps because we don’t want you to leave either.
The Other Chuck
@amk: Different wordpress themes can completely change the way WP works, including screwing with the back button. Specifically what this theme, or possibly plugin, is doing is replacing the simple links on replies with javascript that adds a nice smooth scroll effect while also replacing the browser history entry with that link instead of adding to history (which is what normally happens when you click a link). Which is fucking horrible, what no one wants, and would give me cause to abandon such a theme instantly if I encountered that behavior. Most likely though it’s a config option (on the WP side) to disable that behavior.
Also, the scrollbar color is something that can be (and is in this case) controlled by CSS, meaning the WP theme is doing it.
pamelabrown53
@Tommy Young:
Enjoy your iced coffee, Tommy. I think you’re doing a great job. In other good news, it appears that XL pipeline has not been approved.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Brian Williams, talking about Obama’s nixing of Keystone and broader climate change policies, signs off with White House reporter with giddy chit chat about “beautiful and unseasonable warm weather on the White House lawn”, does not make connection.
Gin & Tonic
@WaterGirl: I think one of the problems here is that, even if Tommy is being paid, he was a commenter long before that professional relationship, and maybe is “off the clock” in this thread. At least he’s accessible – the last redesign involved anonymous people, IIRC, and all we could do is bitch at Cole if we didn’t like something.
Maybe the lesson is that designers/re-designers shouldn’t be members of the commenting community.
The Other Chuck
@amk: Uh, Windows 10 pretty much is exactly like Windows 8 with the start screen disabled by default. You’re starting to sound like a commenter on slashdot from 10 years ago.
But oh yeah, add me to the people calling this revamp a clusterfuck. Seriously, USE A DEV SITE. Is the comments database even backed up?
Tommy Young
@WaterGirl: Here is the problem. First you say you dislike all the “white space” and you also worked in IT. So all the people that say they like the white space, I should just change it because YOU don’t like it (and of course others have said the same thing).When you develop a product do you only make the changes that a few, who make the most noise, request?
Second, what part of a new commenting system is coming don’t you get? It will have numbered comments and be easier to navigate. How many times do I have so say NEW COMMENTING system. But it isn’t ready for “primetime” and we are working directly with the plugin developer. We could roll it out now and it would be a vast improvement, but again not exactly what we want and if I did people would bitch I rolled something out before it was ready.
Third, try using the Tab key for now to navigate back one link.
Tommy Young
@amk:
You have got to be kidding me. I am not sure how I could have been more polite. There are many, just saying maybe, people on this side of things that think I should be handling many of these comments in a drastically different manner …. if at all.
Carolinus
Based on the comments here I get the impression the Left is almost as invested in talking down positive economic news as the Right. Guess that helps explain why Dems have so much trouble getting political credit for their stewardship the economy.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/nov/06/us-jobs-unemployment-rate
…
MomSense
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I don’t know how we break through the media walled in fortress in climate change. The Indonesian inferno is being ignored. The Exxon mess is only getting scant coverage. It’s a complete nightmare.
A guy
New jobless claims for the period ending 10/31 were 261,000. So the net was plus 10k comparatively. Given the population growth and the record number of people not working while the increase is good news it’s hardly worth celebrating.
Tommy Young
@pamelabrown53:
That is very, very good news on many different levels. I don’t think many people realize there is already a phase of it that has been built for a long time. It comes into a community not that far from where I live.
You can “smell” those communities from miles away. I don’t care about the “good” jobs, nobody should have to live there. The only thing I can think to describe the smell was when I had two toliets replaced a few weeks ago. The sewer gas was such I almost got sick, had to step outside and just leave the house until the plumber was done. That is what the communites with the refineries and that pipeline kind of smell like.
WaterGirl
@Tommy Young: Wow. Just wow. Please see my previous comment about professional communication with users when you are providing an IT-related service.
Paul in KY
@WaterGirl: Personally, I think in this site redesign scenario that the ‘user’ is John Cole. You are a ‘beta tester’.
Paul in KY
@A guy: Over 10,000 more people have paying jobs, so let’s all boo that. That’s a Republican for you.
sukabi
While 271,000 jobs looks good on paper, I’d like to point out that since it’s fall, the majority of those jobs are likely part time seasonal jobs…tis the season.
AxelFoley
@TG Chicago:
Exactly.
Tommy Young
@WaterGirl: Nothing about my comment was rude and I see no way we can have a conversation because nothing I say, well anything I say you just take and put back to me as more of the problem. I am doing everything I can to try to engage people, explain what we are doing, listen, but I should have just followed John’s advice and never once got into these threads, much less respond to any of you. I am out of this thread ………..
WaterGirl
@Paul in KY: You are right, but if I were Cole, if I hired a professional web designer, I sure as hell wouldn’t let them talk to people that way. Totally unprofessional.
I adore Cole and I don’t think I’ve ever criticized him on this blog, but this whole thing is a clusterfuck and I think he needs to do something about it. There’s no shame in realizing you are in over your head, and I think Tommy is in over his head and we should go back to the old site until a professionally designed system – one that doesn’t lose functionality compared to what we had before – can be designed and rolled out.
Davebo
@WaterGirl:
So I assume you made a significant cash contribution to Balloon Juice right?
I didn’t think so. As the great George Carlin said, If you don’t like the weather… Move.
Davebo
I believe we may have reached Peak Site Redesign Whining.
Turn off your wifi folks. The internet is over.
20 years after it’s initial introduction Javascript is now the enemy.
Watchman
@Brachiator:
Fundamentally inaccurate.
The Republicans have no solution, that part is right.
The Democrats on the other hand have remade the health care economy with the Affordable Care Act and are about to implement the Trans-Pacific Partnership to remake the rest. While the Republicans are happily engaging in the behavior you attribute to them, the Democrats are taking 100% of the blame for it in local and state races, and in particular the current occupant of the White House is being held responsible.
After seven long years of the Democrats arguing what they tried might have worked if the Republicans hadn’t sabotaged it, the idea that Barack Obama may go down as a disliked if not hated and despised president simply hasn’t occurred to a lot of Balloon Juice front page writers.
Nom de Plume
It’s important to remember that the main wingnut talking point regarding any good employment report is to pretend that the Baby Boom never happened, and that 10,000 Boomers aren’t turning 65 every day (yes, that’s per DAY).
Paul in KY
@WaterGirl: I haven’t had any problems, really (use a standard PC). Wish it wasn’t so white & would like numbered comments, but everything else has been A-OK (for me). Tommy is always polite to me.
burnspbesq
@Amir Khalid:
“Just so everyone remembers: Obama is about to make an announcement at the White House, right now. He is expected to ix-nay the Keystone Pipeline once and for all.”
I’m curious to see Trudeau’s reaction. Harper probably would have declared war, or maybe popped an aneurysm.
Mike J
@Davebo:
No, javascript was the enemy even when it was new.
Steeplejack
@benw:
My question is: how many of those new jobs are “good” jobs? My anecdata, mostly taken from (young) former coworkers at B&N, is that most of them are underemployed—still working McJobs or jobs not in their field (if they went to college).
Also, that participation rate of 62.4% seems ominous. Lot of people sitting on the sidelines (especially at “full employment”).
tybee
@Tommy Young:
hang in there, Tommy. Illegitimi non carborundum. :)
lethargytartare
@Omnes Omnibus: “@Gin & Tonic: Tea is better for him.”
more lies from Big Tea – coffee is practically a miracle drug:
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=coffee%20health%20benefits
Nastybrutishntall
There are people here who need to get a life. “This free food sucks, and there’s not enough.”
benw
@Steeplejack: yeah, I think that’s K-thug’s point: even though the month-to-month employment numbers are improving, compared to how they “should be” in a healthy economy is not great. And he blames the “austerity first!” people for hobbling the recovery in 2010.
AxelFoley
@Tommy Young: Ok, just to clear things up for me–Tommy = Tommy Young, right? Your posting styles are similar. Just wanted clarification.
lethargytartare
@Tommy Young: “Second, what part of a new commenting system is coming don’t you get?”
I’ve got no dog in this fight as my default position is every website design sucks, and ever redesign makes it worse, but you really should dial it back a notch or twelve, and consider the possibility that not everyone has read every one of your posts.
the rational thing to do would be to put an “under contstruction” banner at the top of the site, and detail what’s being worked on instead of yelling at anyone who complains when they wander in and find out someone moved all the furniture.
an even more rational thing to do would be to subcontract customer service, cuz yr doin it wrong
Gin & Tonic
@AxelFoley: Yes.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@jeffreyw: Neat. Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
The Other Chuck
Since userstyles.org has pretty well fucked up their login system, I’ve had to upload the Better Balloon Juice stylesheet to a new location and name, namely “More Better Balloon Juice”
https://userstyles.org/styles/120500/more-better-balloon-juice
Davebo
@Mike J:
I’d have to disagree.
Brachiator
@Watchman: RE: The Democrats on the other hand have remade the health care economy with the Affordable Care Act and are about to implement the Trans-Pacific Partnership to remake the rest.
Too early to see impact on the economy.
RE: While the Republicans are happily engaging in the behavior you attribute to them, the Democrats are taking 100% of the blame for it in local and state races, and in particular the current occupant of the White House is being held responsible.
Political finger-pointing vs actual responsibility is two separate things. Also, neither the media nor the public have much of a grasp on the larger economic problems. And Obama gets credit for successes as well as failures, and public opinion is still fluid here.
RE: After seven long years of the Democrats arguing what they tried might have worked if the Republicans hadn’t sabotaged it, the idea that Barack Obama may go down as a disliked if not hated and despised president simply hasn’t occurred to a lot of Balloon Juice front page writers.
No real evidence that Obama is being judged as harshly as you suggest, but thanks for trying. And the larger issue is that whether Obama is loved or hated is not related to the problem of the overall contraction of the economy.
satby
@Davebo: Actually whether she did or not really isn’t your issue.
Thoughtful Today
@Davebo:
“… Javascript is now the enemy …”
It has been from zero hour.
NoScript and a deleted (and then selectively permitted) white list is your friend.
Matt McIrvin
@Tommy Young: I like threaded comments, but most the commenters here hate them with a burning passion, and if you put them in, you will see a revolt dwarfing anything that’s happened thus far.
AxelFoley
@Gin & Tonic: Ok, thanks!
AxelFoley
@sukabi:
In October? Really, dude?
Matt McIrvin
The St. Louis Fed website has a million charts that are useful for separating out demographic effects. Here’s the overall civilian labor force participation rate:
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CIVPART
It’s been dropping like a rock ever since the late 90s and shows no signs of slowing down. It’s this big sort of parabolic thing, with the wiggles of the business cycle and the seasons superposed on it.
But here’s the rate for people from 25 to 54 years old:
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LNU01300060
Still declining since the late 90s, but the decline is much more modest and the last few years are basically flat, because the economic recovery is pushing against it.
That suggests that most of this decline (probably not all of it, but most) really is just that the population is getting older. I do think a secondary effect is young people entering the workforce later.
If you break it down by men and women it’s interesting too: the participation rate for men has been declining ever since the 1950s, and the general rise up to around 1999 was all because women were coming into the workforce.
Xantar
Doesn’t BLS account for seasonal jobs in their calculations?
Watchman
@Brachiator:
Except for all the lost governorships, the 80-plus lost House seats, the 14 lost Senate seats, the hundreds of lost state legislature seats and the Democratic Party now having been relegated to a regional party of 12-14 states.
You can choose to look at it as “President Obama is the lone bright spot in this dismal party” in this scenario, but then that ignores the number of races lost when Republicans relentlessly nationalized races and made great strides in turning the country red.
I mean all those endless stump speeches Obama made for Mr. Conway certainly helped him defeat Matt Bevin, yes?
Matt McIrvin
@Xantar: There are seasonally adjusted and not-seasonally-adjusted numbers. I think the headline “this many jobs created” numbers you usually hear about are not seasonally adjusted.
Admiral_Komack
Hell, when are the DEMOCRATS going to tout the successes of a DEMOCRATIC President, considering all they ever do is run from him?
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is fucking incompetent.
Steeplejack
@The Other Chuck:
Thank you, thank you! I will definitely check this out. I have used the Better Balloon Juice stylesheet (with some tweaks of my own) for quite a while, and then a few weeks ago it got partially or mostly broken. The big thing I noticed was that the body text went from the “good” font I was using back to the dismal default sanserif font. It seemed to happen around the same time as I did my penultimate Firefox upgrade. (I just upgraded to 42.0; the previous version was 41.[something].) But I don’t think it was completely broken, because the comment time stamps were still up next to the nym, instead of just below. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Stylish, making sure I had the latest version of BBJ, etc. Nothing worked.
Possibly related, Stylish no longer appears in the add-on bar. I usually don’t have that displayed, but when I was troubleshooting I noticed that Stylish didn’t show up on it.
Also possibly related, I upgraded to Windows 10 on this machine a month or so ago. Can’t see why that would have any effect, but who knows?
Anyway, just FYI, and I hope you see this. Your comments about the FYWP site upgrade have been useful.
WaterGirl
@benw: Thanks. Yeah, I tried the TAB key days ago, and sadly it doesn’t take me to my previous location.
I tried to figure out what typo you were referring to, and then I decided you must have thought “balloon man” was a typo where I meant to say “balloon juice”? That would be funny. But I was really talking about the old balloon man that was on a very early version of BJ. I loved him. (balloon man)
Jenny
@Brachiator:
The party holding the WH always lose significant seats during midterms. It happened to FDR, Truman, Ike, LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Dubya.
When Roosevelt entered office there were 322 Dems in congress, but by 1946 it had fallen to 184. Now was that a rejection of social security, minimum wage, the right to unionize, ending child labor, the gi bill, and defeating the nazis and the great depression. No, as none of that was repealed.
When Ike entered office there were 248 republicans in congress, but by 1958 it had fallen to 153. These losses occurred even though Ike was non-controversial. The WH losing midterms is the way of the world and the way of politics.
That said, you’re engaging one of Griftwald’s cult members. He’s been stalking Zandar for years because he has repeatedly debunked and exposed griftwald’s lunacy.
Trying to deprogram a member of the paranoid tinfoil hat brigade is as fruitful as deprogramming a moonie.
The Other Chuck
@Watchman:
A dozen states comprising more than half the population. That’s 2010 gerrymandering for you, combined with the emoprog insistence on only focusing on POTUS races, with a healthy assist from the gerrymandered nature of the way the states are created in the first place.
Shorter: California counts for about a dozen rectangle states alone. Or should, in an actual fucking democracy.
Oh, but now I remember who you are. Plonk.