Signs, Signs, Everywhere the Signs

[Ludi]

Patience, your experience with engineers reminds me of my dad's experience with dental students. My dad taught dentistry for 30 years. At age 80, after a quintuple bypass, he still mentors at the dental school. In the past, students were required to do a great deal of hands-on lab work, carve model teeth, make crowns and bridges, etc Now they do almost none of this work and my dad is frustrated by their lack of "hand skills." Their training seems academic merely, not practical. In most disciplines, it seems we're producing a generation or two of people who can't actually DO anything, though they may be quite academically clever.

[Newfie]

Yeah, electrical engineers get nothing but math.

Twice in my life I have had to throw things at people to keep them from getting hit by a train.

Once, during a strike, they assigned me (manager) an BSEE engineer as an assisstant. I was up a catenary pole (steel I-beam) on skates and his job, as ground man, was to send stuff up to me.

The brain farts in upper management would run one train a day, just to devil the union. It was run by "managers" but they would just creep around because you could not trust the grade crossings.

So here I am, 30-feet up a steel pole, the train is coming round the bend, and turkey brain is staring in my general direction but all his lights were out; adrift in a sea of confusion. The train blew its horn, I shouted, but he just stood there, head cocked back, mouth ajar, drool wafting in the breeze.

So I winged my line wrench at him. But I couldn't get a good angle and missed. Still it woke him up. Never saw him again after that day.

True story, I couldn't make it up, no one would believe it and I don't have that much imagination. For example I can't imagine where his head was at but it wern't at work. Train horns ain't for nothing.

[FoolYap]

From "Endgame" by John Michael Greer:

I’ve mentioned more than once in these essays the foreshortening effect that textbook history can have on our understanding of the historical events going on around us. The stark chronologies most of us get fed in school can make it hard to remember that even the most drastic social changes happen over time, amid the fabric of everyday life and a flurry of events that can seem more important at the time.

This becomes especially problematic in times like the present, when apocalyptic prophecy is a central trope in the popular culture that frames a people’s hopes and fears for the future. When the collective imagination becomes obsessed with the dream of a sudden cataclysm that sweeps away the old world overnight and ushers in the new, even relatively rapid social changes can pass by unnoticed. The twilight years of Rome offer a good object lesson; so many people were convinced that the Second Coming might occur at any moment that the collapse of classical civilization went almost unnoticed; only a tiny handful of writers from those years show any recognition that something out of the ordinary was happening at all.

Reflections of this sort have been much on my mind lately, and there’s a reason for that. Scattered among the statistical noise that makes up most of today’s news are data points that suggest to me that business as usual is quietly coming to an end around us, launching us into a new world for which very few of us have made any preparations at all.

Here’s one example. Friends of mine in a couple of midwestern states have mentioned that the steady trickle of refugees from the Chicago slums into their communities has taken a sharp turn up. There’s a long history of dysfunction behind this. Back in 1999, Chicago began tearing down its vast empire of huge high-rise projects, promising to replace them with less ghastly and more widely distributed housing for the poor. Most of the replacements, of course, never got built. When the waiting list for Section 8 rent subsidies, the only other option available, got long enough to become a public relations problem, the bureaucrats in charge simply closed the list to new applicants; rumors (hotly denied by the Chicago city government) claim that poor families in Chicago were openly advised to move to other states. Whether for that reason or simple economic survival, a fair number of them did.

Fast forward to the middle of 2009. Around then, facing budget deficits second only to California, the state of Illinois quietly stopped paying its social service providers. In theory, the money is still allocated; in practice, it’s been more than six months since Illinois preschools, senior centers, food banks, and the like have received a check from the state for the services they provide, and many of them are on the verge of going broke. Subsidized rent has apparently taken an equivalent hit. Believers in free-market economics have been insisting for years that the end of rent subsidies would let the free market reduce rents to a level that people could afford, but I don’t recommend holding your breath; this is the same free market, remember, that gave the United States some of the world’s worst slums in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The actual effects have been instructive. Squeezed between sharply contracting benefits and a sharply contracting job market, many of Chicago’s poor are hitting the road, heading in any direction that offers more options. Forget the survivalist fantasy of violent hordes pouring out of the inner cities to ravage everything in their path; today’s slum residents are instead becoming the Okies of the Great Recession. In the process, part of business as usual in the United States is coming to an end.

...

[patience]

I have a daughter near San Diego, now disabled with a severe back injury. She has a Mexican maid that comes in part time, who is asking for more work hours, since her other part time sources have dried up.

Across the street is a neighbor who was a Physician's Assistant (~$100K.Yr), recently downsized out of a job. She was offered a job as a nurse's aide, but turned it down (mistake). So, she is deemed to have resigned, and gets no unemployment. Can't find a job as a PA anywhere--it is now an extinct species out there, they say. This woman has been visiting my daughter lately, offering to help her with whatever, knowing her limitations. Daughter just figured out that she wants to work part time for her!

This neighbor always seemed to have more money than our girl, and had lots of home renovations and mortgages, I'm told. Probably, her world is crashing down around her ears right now.

Thankfully, our daughter is in fine shape financially, but that depends on an annuity from an insurance settlement over a disability. If their bank goes under, I don't think it is FDIC insured. And it would take a court ruling to allow them to even move the money somewhere else..... Overnight, this could become a problem.

[Newfie]

Here is a nice rant from Michel Martin I heard on NPR this AM.

The Corporation Code: Where Is Responsibility?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... 123502914#

[the48thronin]

According to the Association of American Railroads, there were 449,000, or 29 percent of all cars, in storage as of Jan. 1. That's down from the half million, or 32 percent of all cars, in storage in June and July. However, the organization reports that only 2 to 3 percent of cars are in storage in a healthy economy.

Freight-less cars
By Michael Bradwell, Business editor, mbradwell@observer-reporter.com





For a couple of months, a long string of black railroad tanker cars has sat motionless on a trestle not far from the Chestnut Street exit of Interstate 70.
They're not part of a backlogged shipment of chemicals or other industrial fluids, but instead represent the local piece of a bigger picture of the U.S. economy, a railroad executive said last week.

Michael Filoni, director of sales and marketing for Carload Express Inc. of Scottdale, Westmoreland County, said the cars are owned by private companies - chemical manufacturers and other industrial companies - that aren't using them because of the slow economy.

Carload Express, which owns and operates the Allegheny Valley Railroad and two other short-haul railroads serving Western Pennsylvania and Central Ohio, is being paid to store the cars on its extra rail siding for the companies until the economy - and rail freight shipments - pick up speed again.


"A large contingency of the rail car fleet is in storage right now," Filoni said. "This is something that's going on across the country," he said of the current fleet of tankers, flatbeds, box cars and gondolas sitting idle nationwide.

[salom]

"A large contingency of the rail car fleet is in storage right now," Filoni said. "This is something that's going on across the country," he said of the current fleet of tankers, flatbeds, box cars and gondolas sitting idle nationwide.

[/quote]

Next up: In yet another brilliant short-sighted decision, most of these companies dump their excess fleet to salvage....

[redstategreen]

Communities printing their own currency

Borrowing from a Depression-era idea, they are aiming to help consumers make ends meet and support struggling local businesses.

The systems generally work like this: Businesses and individuals form a network to print currency. Shoppers buy it at a discount — say, 95 cents for $1 value — and spend the full value at stores that accept the currency.

Workers with dwindling wages are paying for groceries, yoga classes and fuel with Detroit Cheers, Ithaca Hours in New York, Plenty in North Carolina or BerkShares in Massachusetts.

Ed Collom, a University of Southern Maine sociologist who has studied local currencies, says they encourage people to buy locally. Merchants, hurting because customers have cut back on spending, benefit as consumers spend the local cash.

[strider3700]

We have that up here or at least had. I don't remember what it was called but the stores downtown used to take it. Of course just a little north of me there is an island with it's own mint. They make their own currency but it's done in silver and gold coins. The problem is it has high collector value so it's selling for well above spot price.

[patience]

I wonder how sales tax collection works with local currencies? Govts are rabid about collecting their taxes....

[mdiw]

With China dumping yet more US Treasury Bonds, they will become even more rabid about per suing every tax dollar they can Print***darnit I mean find.

[rattleshirt]

The school's in Indiana are getting a budget cut from the state. The local school systen is offering early retirement to 67 teachers and eliminating programs. In the next county over they are considering eliminating school librarians and book purchases.

[patience]

rattleshirt,

Yeah, I've heard of similiar things going on in Clark and Floyd counties. More of this to come, I'm sure.

[strider3700]

They're closing schools up here. as the student population dropped they consolidated as much as they could and are now just laying everyone off and moving the students else where cramming them in. I've heard that the town I went to university in is closing 1/3 of it's schools due to budget issues. Those classes are going to be packed.

[Newfie]

Did a bunch of driving around this week, heard a PBS station talking about the problems of Silicone Valley.

Seems like 60% of all engineering and math graduates are from foreign countries.

When their work permit runs out they have to leave.

I think that says something right there. Maybe two or more things, but I can't count that high.

[strider3700]

A lot of my graduating class (compsci) went down to the States to work in the valley or washington. I'd guess at least 50% of those that didn't go on to masters. It's been 9 years and most are still down there as far as I know. Canada to the US used to be fast tracked on getting the work visa if it was for computers so maybe it's the same on getting permanent status.

[Ludi]

Today I saw the first dramatic sign of a slowdown in retail construction on the edge of the city. Last year a large tract, maybe 50-100 acres was scraped for a shopping center. Nothing has been built on the wasteland. Today I saw cattle out there with a few round bales of hay. This is a sign the owner has given up on building and is returning the land to agricultural tax status. There are several of these scraped barren moonscapes around, but this is the first one I've seen returned to livestock.

[patience]

Ludi,

I wonder what happened to the topsoil? Hope the ground can be saved for ag use. We have some of those sites around Louisville, and they won't grow much of anything now. I think they sold the topsoil.

[TWilliam]

I wonder what happened to the topsoil? Hope the ground can be saved for ag use. We have some of those sites around Louisville, and they won't grow much of anything now. I think they sold the topsoil.

That's probably why the cattle are there. The manure they produce will be a good start for rebuilding soil.

[eastbay]

Signs:

Today I attended the grand opening of a bank branch and a slew of the towns leadership was there. Cameras, caterers, even some customers showed up. As the ribbon cut was made the manager commented he was looking forward to making loans for families, farms, and businesses for 25 years or more. Another official jokingly commented, 'in 25 years ... if there are businesses and farms to loan to' ... another received widespread grins while she commented to the effect, 'if there's anything at all left in 25 years'.

The point is, these folks are filled with such doom; freely making such public comments. 5 or 10 years ago such remarks would have never happened in this type of setting. That's a sign, I suppose.