Tag Archives: jonesreader

Fed Announces Beginning of the End of QE3

by StefanWillison Posted on December 18, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

It’s official: we are tapering. The Fed announced today that it would reduce its QE3 bond-buying program from $85 billion per month to $75 billion per month.

So what does this mean? In a nutshell, markets will probably freak out temporarily. Econ pundits will write about a hundred thousand words today exploring every possible nuance of the decision. Ben Bernanke will tell everyone to calm down. In a day or two, there will be some news about the holiday buying season and the whole thing will be forgotten. Five years from now, there will be several doctoral dissertations about what it all really meant.

Substantively, though, this just isn’t that big a deal. You may now return to your regularly scheduled Obamacare bashing and/or defending.

UPDATE AT 11:12 AM: Apparently the Dow is up 100 points on the taper news. So markets don’t seem to be freaking out after all. If this holds, it will be the most quickly disproven prediction I’ve ever made, and yet another lesson that you should never make predictions. Will I ever learn?

Link:

Fed Announces Beginning of the End of QE3

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, oven, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Fed Announces Beginning of the End of QE3

This Might Be the Most Jaw-Dropping Tale of Fraud You Read This Year

by Lila3153jc Posted on December 17, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Yesterday, a friend emailed to complain about this headline at NBC News:

Climate change expert’s fraud was ‘crime of massive proportion,’ say feds

Technically, this headline is correct. It’s about a guy who’s a climate change expert. And he did perpetrate a fraud. The thing is, his fraud had nothing to do with the fact that he’s a climate change expert. So why make it sound that way in the headline? Is it just clickbait for the fever swamp denier crowd?

And yet! You really, really ought to click the link and read the story anyway. Just ignore the ridiculous headline and dig in. This really is one of the more remarkable fraud stories of the year. I guarantee your mouth will be hanging open by the time you finish it.

See original article – 

This Might Be the Most Jaw-Dropping Tale of Fraud You Read This Year

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Might Be the Most Jaw-Dropping Tale of Fraud You Read This Year

Beyoncé Redefines the Word "Quiet"

by Pauline80x Posted on December 15, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

From the Wall Street Journal:

Beyoncé Releases Latest Album—Quietly

Can we please stop this? This wasn’t some kind of stealth release. It was a brilliant use of viral marketing. Beyoncé and a few of her buddies “quietly” advertised the new album to about ten or twenty million of their closest friends, all of whom thought they were being let in on a secret and immediately went out and crashed the iTunes server farm. It was genius. Even if it only works once, it’s genius.

But quiet? Only if you have a five-year-old’s understanding of human nature. To misquote everyone’s favorite America-hating superhero, it was an awfully loud kind of quiet, man.

See original article:  

Beyoncé Redefines the Word "Quiet"

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Beyoncé Redefines the Word "Quiet"

Being Smart Isn’t Always Enough to Make it in America

by c7u433n Posted on December 12, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Via James Pethokoukis, here’s an interesting tidbit of income mobility data from a new Brookings report. The chart below is a little tricky to read, but basically it shows how likely you are to make more money than your parents. You’d naturally expect smart kids to do better than dimmer kids, so it tracks that too.

Take a look at the green column on the far left. It’s for kids who grow up in the very poorest families. If you have high cognitive ability, you have a 24 percent chance of becoming a high earner as an adult. That’s not too bad.

But if you come from a high-income family, you have a 45 percent chance of becoming a high earner as an adult. Same smarts, different outcome.

No society will ever get this perfect. Still, there’s a huge difference between 24 percent and 45 percent. Better schools, more extracurricular opportunities, different skin color, bigger networks of connected friends, higher odds of going to college, and the simple ability to get in the door all give richer kids a huge leg up that poor kids don’t have. We obviously have a ways to go before everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed in America.

View original:  

Being Smart Isn’t Always Enough to Make it in America

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Being Smart Isn’t Always Enough to Make it in America

Support for a $10 Minimum Wage Is Surprisingly High

by Elva Diller Posted on December 11, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I’m not super interested in the latest poll results about whether Obama’s approval is up or down a point or two, or whether Obamacare is up or down a point or two. It’ll all shake out soon enough. But the Wall Street Journal’s latest poll asked about raising the minimum wage, and the results were pretty interesting:

So 63 percent were in favor of raising the minimum wage to $10.10. That’s surprisingly high. Hell, 43 percent even favor raising it to $12.50. I don’t imagine that this support is especially deep or passionate, but it’s still pretty high. As Damon Silvers of the AFL-CIO says, “If I was a House Republican, I’d be concerned about opposing anything that polled at 63%.”

Of course, gun registration polls at better than 63 percent, and so do higher taxes on the rich, just to name a couple of examples. That doesn’t seem to have caused very many Republicans to start quaking in their boots. Still, it’s encouraging news.

Original link: 

Support for a $10 Minimum Wage Is Surprisingly High

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Support for a $10 Minimum Wage Is Surprisingly High

Children Killed by Guns Since Newtown: Data from Mother Jones’ Investigation

by N0bodyh56 Posted on December 10, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A year after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Mother Jones has analyzed the subsequent deaths of 194 children ages 12 and under who were reported in news accounts to have died in gun accidents, homicides, and suicides. They are spread across 43 states, from inner cities to tiny rural towns. Read the story here, see the interactive gallery here, and explore our full special report here.

(Click here for the Google Spreadsheet view of the below data, and click here to download in CSV, XLS, and TXT formats.)

View article: 

Children Killed by Guns Since Newtown: Data from Mother Jones’ Investigation

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Children Killed by Guns Since Newtown: Data from Mother Jones’ Investigation

A Brisk, Brash, Garage-y Debut From Ireland’s Dott

by charlenedean Posted on December 9, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Dott
Swoon
Graveface

Brisk, brash and endearing, the sparkling debut of this Irish quartet will renew your faith in tuneful garage rock. Frontwoman Anna McCarthy and company unleash a dozen fizzy, toe-tapping gems in rapid succession, recalling the Ramones at their sunniest. If Dott’s tales of love found and lost stick to familiar turf, McCarthy’s charming verve makes Swoon hard to resist, creating the sense of hearing unguarded revelations from a heart not yet hardened by cynicism or disappointment. Highlights include “Day That I Found You,” updating ’60s girl-group grooves, and the rowdy, punkish footstomper “Love You Forever,” which could have been a big hit back when New Wave was the hot style.

Jump to original:  

A Brisk, Brash, Garage-y Debut From Ireland’s Dott

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A Brisk, Brash, Garage-y Debut From Ireland’s Dott

Friday Cat Blogging – 6 December 2013

by juan59nylon Posted on December 6, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Today we have a statesmanlike pose of Domino on the stairs. Why? Because that’s where she was when I hauled out my camera, and that’s where she stayed when I started clicking away. This dynamic explains about 90 percent of catblogging. Actually, it might explain about 90 percent of life.

Read original article – 

Friday Cat Blogging – 6 December 2013

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Friday Cat Blogging – 6 December 2013

Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in November

by John Graham Posted on December 6, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The American economy added 203,000 new jobs in November, but about 90,000 of those jobs were needed just to keep up with population growth, so net job growth clocked in at 113,000. That’s about the same rate we’ve seen all year: not too bad, but not great either. We’re plowing ahead, but not really making up lost ground from the Great Recession.

Comparisons with October are tricky, since that was the month of the government shutdown. However, compared to September, the labor force shrank by 265,000 while the number of unemployed shrank by 348,000. That produced a drop in the headline unemployment rate to 7.0%. However, a good chunk of that was due to the shrinking labor force, so it’s only partially good news.

So….it’s sort of a Groundhog Day jobs report. The good news is that that job growth is steady despite the sequester and other austerity measures. The bad news is that people are still dropping out of the labor force in significant numbers, and we aren’t really seeing any acceleration in the job market. We’re still treading water.

Continued:

Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in November

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in November

We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for December 6, 2013

by rqu0hfl0 Posted on December 6, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Marines with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit clean their weapons after completing a small-arms training exercise at Range 111 at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Calif., Nov. 25. The training focused on enhancing the unit’s confidence and proficiency with personal weapons and M67 Fragmentation Hand Grenades.

(U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Emmanuel Ramos/Released)

Taken from:

We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for December 6, 2013

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for December 6, 2013