Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Memetrics
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktPayroll employment increases by 160,000 in April; unemployment rate unchanged at 5.0%
05/06/2016
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 160,000 in April, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 5.0 percent. Employment increased in professional and business services, health care, and financial activities. Job losses continued in mining.
Filed under: Economic data, Open Thread |
All Things in Moderation 
New Open Thread to play with.
Also, Brent, if you are lurking, the link has all sorts of background info. What do you make of it?
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Hi there everyone! I sure wish it was Nov.2nd!
Hope you’re all hanging in there through the torture of this election season.
We’re doing fine here, trying to ignore it and edge our way into retirement by working a 4 day work week from here until we finally give up the ship.
One wedding down and one more to go………..uggghhh.
I’m sorry I never seem to have much time to wander into this space but I think of y’all sometimes! 🙂
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I have youngest daughter’s wedding in 3 weeks and First cousin’s youngest daughter’s in four. One in Austin, one in DC.
Retirement is fantastic. Never an excuse not to go to the gym, however.
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Hi Mark, I’m still at the gym 3 mornings a week and running two more with my dog. Had a shoulder injury in Dec which has kept me out of the pool so I took up running to go with my weight lifting.
Oldest daughter’s wedding in March was a big success and the youngest is getting married at a lodge in Estes Park CO. Just an excuse for a weekend party really! Geologists are big partiers!
Good luck with your weddings and congrats to the happy couples.
Happy to see you’re still going to the gym. I’ve got my leg press up to 490 lbs……LOL
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“Retirement is fantastic. Never an excuse not to go to the gym, however.”
That seems like the best thing about retirement! I hate missing the gym. I’d go a couple of hours a day, 7 days a week, it if it were possible. At least I think so, as I can only do a fraction of that now! … of course, I’d rather have the body of a 20 year old when doing it, so that’s probably going to be a mitigating factor when I can finally retire at 75 or so. 😉
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Hey, lms. Hope all is well.
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Hi Scott!
How’s the family? I bet you’re excited to have the girls home for the summer!
How are the Yankees doing? We went to an Angel’s game last week and they actually won and Trout hit a homerun!!!
Walter’s having some health issues so we’ve been sticking a little closer to home so it was a treat to get to a game!
Nice to see you guys are all still up to your usual tricks!
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lms:
Yes, it will be good to have a full house again. Number 2 came back last weekend, but is now off to Nicaragua for 2 weeks. We’re also starting the college process for the third and last time soon. Yikes.
Yankees blow. I mean they really blow. They have either no-name youngsters or overpaid and over the hill ex superstars. Going to be a looooong season.
Hope the health issues fix themselves. Stay well.
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Not sure the Angels will be much better really this year. They’re pitching staff sucks except for a few guys and they just lost one of them this week for at least 6 to 8 weeks…………ugghhh.
Thanks re health issues………we should know more in a couple of weeks but right now he’s feeling a little better. I’ll try to check in a bit more during this election season although I’m not happy with any of the results to date!
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Good to see you around.
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Thanks jnc……….I always promise to try and spend more time here but life is a bit chaotic right now…..hope you’re doing well!
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“Hope you’re all hanging in there through the torture of this election season.”
It’s awful, isn’t it? I don’t see it ever getting any better, myself. Not in my likely lifetime, anyway.
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Vicente Fox has GOT to be on the Trump payroll.
nd he disparaged Trump supporters as lazy, uneducated, TV watching drunks.
No rational person can think this helps the Democrats.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/pelosi-vicente-fox-plot-to-defeat-trump-mexican-calls-trump-voters-lazy-drunks/article/2590642
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Pretty much. Although by the logic, a huge amount of folks on the left would have be on Trump’s payroll. But the “don’t vote for the demagogue, because we are exactly that crazy, anti-American stereotype he portrays us as” doesn’t seem helpful. Neither does the Nazi comparison, or the idea of Trump voters and the Trump-curious as Klan members and Nazi-supporters. Demographics may sweep Clinton into the Whitehouse as the Democrats clearly anticipate, but enough anti-Trump hysteria could create a backlash.
I haven’t seen many political signs out as yet, but so far those few I’ve seen have all been Trump signs. Of course, he’s going to take Tennessee. It’s not remotely in play for the Dems.
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NYT’s article about an uncontacted Amazonian tribe is really good.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/us/what-makes-texas-texas.html?referer=http://drudgereport.com/
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Someone on Twitter quipped that having the New York Times describe Texas is like having a lesbian describe how to give a blowjob.
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“About a month after I moved here, a 41-year-old man named Mark Stroman told Texas that he loved Texas, just before Texas killed him. As he lay on the gurney in the state’s execution chamber, Mr. Stroman, a convicted murderer who had an eighth-grade education and was a native Texan, uttered as part of his last statement, “Texas loud, Texas proud.” It was a jaw-dropping moment that set a theme for me. After nearly five years in Texas, the theme has only intensified: the metamorphosis of Texas, the country’s second-most populous state, into ultra-Texas, of a singular state into a singular superstate.”
Makes me kinda want to move to Texas. Which I might, when I retire, or when the kids get out of the house. Not sure. Might want to be closer to Disney World and Orlando generally (but not too close!)
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“Because Texans will defends Texas things to their last breath even if the Texas thing is the cause of that last breath.
Sincerely,
A Texan”
-BWG, 12-17-15
This in response to the NYT article.
—
I was in the minority on the Uber vote, but Uber was doing background checks either way. The City wanted to force Uber and Lyft to include finger printing, and a couple of other things.
Because Uber/Lyft had a clean record under its current background check regime the imposition of tougher regulations seemed gratuitous to me, and thus unwarranted.
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As with so much going on at the state level and the federal level, it’s all about making a point. I feel much of the anti-abortion themed legislation and the present LGBT-bathroom kerfuffle comes from the same place.
Tangent: I noted to a very liberal friend (and big Sanders supporter) on Facebook that the North Carolina bathroom law was engendering a lot of crazy melodrama on both sides, and was a non-solution in search of a non-problem. As far as I could tell from her response, she has a large number of LGBT friends who have suffered discrimination, and Ted Cruz got the endorsement of some pastors who had said (apparently) that homosexuals should be stoned to death, and so getting hyperbolically exercised over the North Carolina law made perfect sense. Because it was conflated, for her, with being pro-stoning-gay-people-to-death.
While there may, indeed, be dispassionate, rational people on the right and left (and there certainly are!) so much ideological discourse is fraught with over-the-top emotions, I’m kind of surprised we aren’t getting a Trump/Sanders face off in November. They both seem to represent the pinnacles of high on emotion/low on rationality ideological tribalism. Though, to be fair, Cruz was the high-on-emotion tribalistic avatar of the religious right (as opposed to, say, the fiscal conservative right, which doesn’t really seem to get a seat at the table). Sanders better represents the avatar of the ideological left, while Trump is the representative of pure narcissism with some nationalistic populism thrown in.
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