Posts Tagged ‘jobs’

Five Up too early for a Saturday Thoughts Under the Fedora: World Cup Highlights, The Hardest Part, Musk’s Trillions, Iran Trickling down and Big Finish to the Rescue?

Posted: June 13, 2026 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, doctor who, employment, Sports, under the fedora, war
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I spent some time watching World Cup Highlights yesterday and those highlights demonstrated why the sport is not worth my time.

The highlight reels ran 15-20 min with several replays in them so maybe 10-12 minutes of play. That from a match that runs 90-100 minutes. That’s 80 minutes of dead time where there is no much happening but a guy kicking a ball back to another while they look for a chance to make something happen,

Contrast this with Baseball which while not having a clock has the potential for a run to be scored & a highly happening on every single pitch.

Give me the pine tar & the leather any day.

The worst part of being out of work is the waiting.

Last time around in 2008 I couldn’t buy a job interview. This time I’ve had quite a few. I’m waiting on three companies right now 2 of which had told me I’d be hearing back from them up or down before this point.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy that I’m getting interviews it’s the waiting that throws me for a loop.

It’s not easy at 63 to be competing for positions with people 20+ years younger than you.

Let me remind you of several somethings concerning Elon Musk’s soon to be Trillion dollar net worth.

  1. Musk employs tens of thousands of people
  2. Musk is actively using his wealth for some rather incredible things
  3. There are plenty of people who have never built anything who will critique his wealth for profit. power & clicks.
  4. There are plenty more who only started hating on him once he became a threat to the power of the left or to virtue signal to said left that they’re one of him.
  5. As the old saying goes, he will still be able to only eat one meal at a time & sleep in one bed at a time & will like all of us eventually die.
  6. The only think that really counts in the long run is his relationship with God, I’d worry more about that but I’m too busy worrying about my relationship with God.

But the real thing about Musk’s wealth is this: It’s nothing to do with me and not my concern. He has what he has and does what he does and what he so does is his own business, not mine. I have no more right or claim on what he has than the guy down the street has to mine.

Over the past two weeks gasoline has dropped .29 cents from it’s high in my area. About 9%.

While that’s nice it’s still up 57% from the low it had hit before the Iran War.

This causes me pain but it’s still worth it if Iran is emasculated. What the people who are complaining about the lack of a deal or Trump not getting said deal or bombing them on any given day either don’t understand or ignore is that every day that passes Iran grows weaker and we grow stronger.

As the tankers continue to come to the US & we keep getting tankers in the straits out Iran’s leverage continues to drop. Yeah if we were willing to commit 100,000 troops we could likely bring them down and take the country & the oil but at the cost of 1000’s of US lives that while justifiable in the long run to destroy once & for all the leading terror sponsor in the world, is a price our current society is unwilling to pay & unnecessary if Iran can be emasculated without doing so.

The price will keep trickling down slowly as the alternate supplies continue to open up. I suspect if things aren’t concluded right away it will take till the end of August to see gas at $2.99 again. By that time Iran will be capping wells and their ability to finance jihad outside will be practically finished, which frankly they are almost at now anyways.

That’s a lot less sexy than seeing the Mullahs fall just like winning the cold war over 50 years was a lot less sexy than Patton leading his army against the Soviets in 1945 would have been, but I’ll take less sexy with thousands of less casualties every day of the week.

Finally word is out that the Doctor Who Christmas special is nixed & the BBC is pretty much taking bids to see who wants a shot at running the franchise that they’ve driven into the ground once again.

Like the anti-thatcher stuff that killed it in 1989 the work stuff has made Doctor Who so Toxic that actors have no interest in the iconic role & fans don’t care.

In my opinion the solution is obvious, I’d give it to Big Finish which has been producing original Doctor Who stories for more than a quarter of a century & doing so without needing a government imposed fee to pay the way.

While they have their share of woke they are experts at making stories that people are willing to pay actual money to hear, and while they don’t have experience in TV that doesn’t matter as the special effects and or cinematography are not the problem here. it’s the stories and as Big Finish says: Big Finish, We Love Stories!

Let Big Finish supply the scripts and Doctor Who can thrive again, or let the TV show die and let Big Finish run the Time Lord as strictly audio. Remember it was six years of Big Finish stories starting a decade after the final show that caused it to return. And even if it dies here, remember the first episode was broadcast in 1963 when I was six months old.

Not a bad run.

Nine months that shook the world: A list of Biden’s failures

Posted: October 24, 2021 by John Ruberry in News/opinion, politics
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By John Ruberry

It took four years for Jimmy Carter, America’s 39th president, to amass a reputation for abject failure. Joe Biden only needed nine months, the time it takes for a baby to go from conception to birth. 

Here’s a list–and I am sure that I’m leaving out a few–of his failures. 

Gasoline prices. Liberals hate relatively cheap gas prices. On his first day in office Biden cancelled construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. In doing so, to borrow the words used in the Biden-Harris sign pictured here, he killed thousands of “good union jobs.” Gas prices immediately jumped. Also that day Biden signed an executive order blocking oil and natural gas drilling at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The next day Biden imposed a suspension of new natural gas and oil drilling leases on federal lands–which fortunately was overruled by a judge in June.

It’s all part of the plan is what I believe. Leftists–excluding themselves of course–want as many people as possible to ditch their cars and trucks and take buses and trains everywhere. In 2012 Steven Chu, the Obama-Biden administration’s secretary of Energy, was asked by a Republican member of Congress if it was the goal of the White House to have lower gasoline prices. He replied to the contrary, adding “somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” Gasoline prices in 2012 were about $4-a-gallon–in Europe at that time they were $8 to $9-per gallon. Yeah I know, Chu, under pressure no doubt, walked back those comments the next day, as Barack Obama and Joe Biden were up for reelection that year. 

Gas prices are at a seven-year high. Donald Trump was not president seven years ago.

As I’ve observed many times before, leftists particularly love trains–because they only travel where there are tracks.

On the other hand if you are a liberal you may consider higher gasoline prices as a Joe Biden success. But more expensive fuel hurts the poor the most. And liberal politicians always say it is they, not the evil Republicans, who are protecting poor people.

Afghanistan. I’ll be brief on this one. Yes, Donald Trump made a pledge to pull our troops out by May 1. But Biden extended that deadline to September 11 then he moved it back to August 31. Biden blamed Trump for setting a withdrawal date–after the Afghan government collapsed in the middle of August. Biden promised an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan–and said it would not be like our dramatic and tragic departure from South Vietnam. But that government stayed in power two years after American combat troops were flown home. 

Biden either lied–or forgot–about being advised to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan to at least slow the government’s collapse. During the hasty evacuation from Kabul thirteen members of our military were killed by a terrorist bombing. And despite another Biden promise, Americans were left behind enemy lines in the Taliban-ruled nation. At least 200 remain.

The southern border. While Biden all but said his hands were tied by Trump’s agreement to take our troops out of Afghanistan, he felt no such need to continue the stay-in-Mexico policy for refugees that Trump successfully negotiated with the Mexican president. The result is the ongoing crisis at the southern border. Illegal crossings at that border have soared since January. A record number–1.7 million–have illegally entered the nation at that border so far in 2021. They are unmasked and not checked to see if they are infected by the COVID-19 virus. 

COVID-19. Biden promised to get the virus under control. Meanwhile, despite a vaccine developed under the push initiated by Trump, COVID, by way of the Delta Variant, has roared back. Biden is pushing mask mandates–but what about people crossing the southern border? What’s that about “health care” on that sign?

More Americans have died from COVID-19 in 2021 than in 2020.

Critical race theory: A little more than a year ago President Trump issued an executive order banning divisive CRT training in federal agencies. Biden reversed that order. Biden’s attorney general, faux moderate Merrick Garland, announced that the FBI would investigate parents who protest the teaching of CRT at school board meetings, citing unnamed threats.

Supply chain crisis. About the time Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg went on paternity leave–without publicly disclosing it–the supply chain crisis began. Container ships are backed up in the Pacific off of Long Beach harbor. There is also a shortage of truck drivers. As Santa said in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, “We’ll have to cancel Christmas.” Okay, not really, but there will likely be fewer gifts under Christmas trees this year.

Jobs: Job growth has been anemic since Biden was sworn in.

Inflation. Higher gasoline prices are always a driver of inflation. And I already mentioned the shortage of truck drivers. Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan pumped cash into the economy. While that seems like a good thing at the base level inflation is caused when there is too much money chasing too few goods. And there is a shortage of semiconductor chips, new automobiles, used cars, plastics, palm oil, magnesium, and more. Oh, besides truck drivers there are not enough workers overall. Biden and the Democrats want to double down on stupid with a so-called infrastructure bill, Build Back Better, priced at over $3 trillion. That bill is drenched with social-engineering and Green New Deal nonsense. Inflation is not going away.

Hunter Biden: Just last week a New York art gallery began selling his paintings. Influence peddling is a long tradition of the Biden family. Who will buy Hunter’s artwork?

Kamala Harris: Biden’s vice president, the Queen of Cackles, was put in charge of the southern border. How is that working out? Biden turns 79 next month and Harris is a heartbeat away from succeeding him. He could have of course done worse with a running mate choice, but Biden also could have done so much better.

Cognitive decline. The spin has been off of Joe Biden’s fastball–and that pitch was never a commanding one–for a few years now. On a mental level things will only get worse for him. Is Biden running the White House? If not then who is?

Or is no one in charge?

Why haven’t we heard from Biden’s doctor, Kevin C. O’Connor?

Allies losing faith in us. People are attracted to strong leaders and repelled by weak ones. Unless, in regards to the latter, bad people want to take something that doesn’t belong to them. Like for instance, Taiwan. I already mentioned the Afghanistan debacle. But Biden screwed over the French by stealing a nuclear submarine deal they had with Australia. Or maybe I’m being too harsh. John Kerry said the Biden didn’t even know about the France deal.

Can America be trusted? Can America be relied upon? Our allies are surely asking those questions. And our enemies, China, Russia, and North Korea, certainly sense opportunity.

And of course we are just nine months into this Rosemary’s Baby of an administration.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Update (DTG) Welcome Whatafinger readers. Take a look around. Check out these interviews with General Bolduc who is running for the US Senate in NH, and Rebekah Hagan of the Abortion Pill Reversal Network check out my quick commentary on a trap that employers are falling into not to mention Christopher Harper’s piece titled Jimmy Carter Redux and if you live in driving distance of Fitchburg MA, Medford Ma or Boston come see Fr. Leonard Mary of EWTN Tuesday through Sat for events masses and healing services, details here.

And if you really like what you read please consider kicking into DaTipJar so I can afford to keep paying John and the rest of my Magnificent Seven writers every month.

Update 2 (DTG) Biden vs Trump in song before the election a less musical list is here. plus this line on Joe Biden on the day he was sworn in:

Which brings us to Joe Biden. He comes into office with one advantage that Trump had namely the lowest expectations of any incoming president for years.

He has one disadvantage that Trump never had but Obama did, a press that will by so fawning (till Jan 21st 2023) that he will never be challenged (till Jan 21st 2023) which will make his mistakes more glaring and likely more destructive as they’ll not be challenged.

The media is still spinning these failures as success at least as much as they can.

Help Wanted!

Posted: October 12, 2021 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
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By Christopher Harper

As you drive throughout central Pennsylvania, it’s difficult not to notice something other than fall foliage: Help wanted signs abound throughout the region.

On Route 11, which snakes along the countryside near my home, more than 70 signs seeking employees dominate the highway. 

Fred Gaffney, executive director of Columbia Montour Chamber of Commerce, told a local newspaper that he’s at a loss to say why. “This is a workforce crisis unlike anything I’ve seen in my years at the Chamber,” Gaffney said.

Recently, a local job fair featured more than 500 openings from 25 employers. But only 40 people attended, Gaffney said. Businesses in the area have raised their minimum wages to $15 an hour and higher. 

What’s happening near my home is occurring throughout the country. According to the National Federation of Independent Business, 67% of small businesses reported hiring or trying to hire in September, and 42% raised compensation. But a record 51% still have openings they couldn’t fill.

The Wall Street Journal postulated in a recent editorial: “So what’s causing the worker shortage? One possible culprit is government and employer vaccine mandates that set ultimatums for workers. President Biden’s vaccine order first applied to nursing homes, which lost jobs in the month. Many states and school districts have also imposed mandates, and state and local education employment fell 161,000. The White House claims its vaccine mandates will boost job growth, but not if unvaccinated workers quit.”

The lack of workers has clearly become a drag on the economy. Ships are backed up at ports partly because there aren’t workers to unload and transport goods to where they need to go. Labor and material shortages are delaying projects and increasing prices in the home-building sector.

Another factor is that it doesn’t pay to work in some cases when the government provides enough money to keep people off the job. 

For my wife and me, it’s meant postponing work on our new home because there aren’t enough painters and other tradespeople to perform needed maintenance. For example, we can’t get anyone to paint the exterior of our house until next spring.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration seemingly has no strategy to solve the problems.

In an interview with Business Insider, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh has a lame analysis:

–People are afraid to go back to work because of the Delta variant.

–People have moved out of areas where employers are hiring.

–People are rethinking their attitude toward work—what one psychologist has called the “the great resignation.”

“I think a lot of people are re-imagining or rethinking about what’s next for them,” Walsh said. The pandemic has changed people’s views about work, causing them to “ask existential questions about their purpose and happiness,” Business Insider noted. 

Whatever the case, it would appear that the labor conflagration won’t be solved anytime soon, particularly under this administration.

I guess I may have to get out the work clothes and ladder to ponder the existential question of whether to paint or not to paint.

There will be no Biden reset

Posted: September 19, 2021 by John Ruberry in crime, economy, immigration, media, News/opinion, politics
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By John Ruberry

After a summer of failures, including the resurgence of COVID-19, horrid job numbers, the crisis at the southern border, rampant urban crime, and our humiliating exit from Afghanistan, there was hope within the Biden White House, cheered on by the compliant media, that a reset was due with the new season.

But over this weekend, which isn’t over yet as of this writing, things got worse. In a flashback to the Obama years, the Pentagon chose Friday afternoon–a Friday news dump–to reveal not only that the August drone strike in Afghanistan didn’t slay any ISIS-K terrorists, but the bombing killed an aid worker and nine members of his family, including seven children. Also that afternoon France recalled its ambassador to the USA after the Biden administration, behind France’s back, announced a deal with Great Britain to sell nuclear submarines to Australia. But France already had a deal, now cancelled, with the Aussies. If you ever worked as a salesperson and saw a sleazy co-worker swipe a lucrative sale from you, then you know that feeling of betrayal.

Also on Friday, in a story that is largely being ignored by the national media except for Fox News, a Third World-style shanty town, with thousands of illegal immigrant inhabitants, was discovered on the Rio Grande in Del Rio, Texas.

There will be no reset for Joe Biden and his administration. That’s because, as I’ve written at DTG over these last few weeks, it is very likely that the president is suffering from cognitive decline. There are people in their seventies and eighties who still have nimble minds. Biden, who turns 79 later this year, is not one of them. Age-related cognitive decline is not reversible. And with crisis after crisis emerging, it’s becoming clear that no one is in charge at the White House, even though, as John Kass remarked, Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, is openly referred to as “President Klain.”

I get it. Sometimes calamity after calamity happens. Lyndon B. Johnson suffered an entire year, 1968, like that. And LBJ of course decided not to run for a second full-term as president that year.

But some of Biden’s debacles were preventable, such as his abandoning Donald J. Trump’s remain-in-Mexico policy regarding migrants, which led to the crisis at the southern border. No one, outside of military contractors, wanted our military involvement in Afghanistan to indefinitely continue. But Biden promised our withdrawal from Afghanistan wouldn’t look like our departure from South Vietnam. Well, Biden was right on that vow–our exit from Afghanistan was worse than that.

The administration’s response to COVID-19, once seen as a strong point for Biden, is also a problem for him. Last week a poll revealed that for the first time a majority of Americans don’t approve of the way Biden is handling fighting the virus. 

So far Biden has gotten a pass for gasoline prices being 40-percent more than they were one year ago when that mean Tweeter with the orange hair was president. Escaping blame for Americans paying more at the pump can’t last forever. for Biden. As temperatures cool urban crime will decline but it will bounce back, as it always does, in the spring. That will give Biden and the Democrats another headache in 2022. Look for Republicans running for House and Senate seats to use crime fears as a central theme in their television commercials, as they did with great success last year. Despite denials the Democrats are the party of “Defund the Police.” Biden has gotten a pass for inflation for now. But his reckless policy of printing money will likely create even more inflation.

What else?

I’ve mentioned this quote before but it needs to be repeated.

Barack Obama reportedly once said of his vice president, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up.” And that was before Biden’s cognitive decline set in.

I don’t like quoting myself, but I really think my Tweet of mine from last month hit the nail on Biden’s head.

“If I just awakened from a 10-year long coma and I saw what a mess America finds itself in now I would come to one quick conclusion. Somehow Joe Biden became president.”

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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