Freeman Dyson...

A good story, partly about Freeman Dyson's status as an AGW skeptic.  There's also a nice video about the Orion Project (nuclear bomb-powered rockets) and Dyson's participation in it.

I've read a lot about Freeman Dyson, and watched several documentaries that he was part of.  One of his children (Esther) is prominent in the software industry; I've met her several times at conferences and once (around 1995) participated in a fascinating panel discussion that included her, about the future of the Internet.  We all got it wrong, but she was arguably more right than the rest of us, predicting that the most fundamental impacts of the Internet would be on communications and social interactions.  Another of his children (George) is a science historian, and I've read two of his books (both quite good).

Imagine...

Imagine, for one horrifying moment, that you're a bureaucrat within a major city's administrative staff.  Within your purview are the city's collection of public swimming pools, including responsibility for hiring lifeguards.  Now imagine that you're making up a list of requirements that applicants for lifeguard jobs must meet:

- swimming: nope, not required
- racial minority: you're hired

This is not a joke; it is the reality in Phoenix, Arizona.  Seriously.  And the progressives think it's just wonderful.

Doom...

Oh, Noos!

Looks like the Jamul Indian Tribe has secured another financier (and manager) for their casino project.  Penn National Gaming is the source.  Details are skimpy, but they do claim $360 million for development of a 200,000 square foot, three story facility.  They're claiming that construction will start later this year, and will take two years.  They are, of course, wrapping this up with claims of job creation (“up to”  1,200 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs).

I'd never heard of Penn National Gaming, but a little quick searching reveals that they are a public company, traded on NASDAQ under the symbol PENN.  Their stock price is on a roll.  Market cap is $4.17B; revenues are approaching $3B/year – a significant company with lots of resources.  They are currently operating 29 gambling facilities.

Here we go again...

Introduction to Intel x64 Assembly Programming...

From the folks at Intel...

Painfully Grotesque Propaganda...

That's Tyler Durden's apt characterization of the latest news on the job front.  The lamestream media was full of the “drop” in the unemployment rate (from 7.7% to 7.6%) and the lower-than-expected new jobs (about 40% of the consensus economist forecast, which just shows you how much that is worth.

That's the propaganda.  The truth is much more dismal: the unemployment rate only went “down” because of an accounting trick I've discussed here many times before – the so-called “discouraged” workers are removed from the calculation altogether.  If you actually want work, but you've given up looking for a job (because there aren't any!), you're not counted as unemployed.  That makes sense only on Planet Politics, certainly not here on Earth.

A much more useful number is the labor force participation rate: the percentage of adults who are actually working.  This month it dropped to 63.3%, the lowest since 1979.  My readers of a certain age will recall that year as the height of the Jimmy Carter “stagnation” recession – absolutely awful economic conditions and a huge national debate about how to recover from it (this eventually helped propel Ronald Reagan into office).  Now with the same labor force participation rate, we're being told that we're in the midst of a “slow, steady recovery”.

Well, pardon me for being skeptical.  I hear the drums of doom, drawing ever closer...

Here's a graph showing the labor force participation rate since 1979.  With our current population of about 310 million, each percentage point is millions of jobs.  More information here and here...