It's Brightening Up Out There
Here's a clip from an online rag I get:
Silicon Valley added 400 jobs last month. It's only the second monthly job gain since the local economy collapsed back in March 2001, according to payroll data released Monday. While minuscule, the numbers have given some economists hope that the region may be about to emerge from its economic coma. At the same time, observers cautioned that growth will remain slow and that it will be many years -- at best -- before the region recovers the more than 200,000 jobs it lost.
I used to work in the valley. I left right as the dot com disaster was beginning to unfold. Colleagues, at least the ones who could find work, told me that commuting, once a horrific nightmare, was no longer a problem. It doesn't sound like things have changed much. I understand that many people have simply left the area because they couldn't hold on. The valley sports some of the highest cost of living in the country so it takes two incomes to just own a house there typically.
So, lets do the math...800 jobs in 31 months (or 26 jobs/month)...to make up 200,000 jobs would take 7,662 months or 638 years at this rate of growth. Even if we assumed that we could sustain this stellar growth rate from month to month, it would take 498 months or 42 years. Silicon Valley is purportedly the most aggressive and technologically grounded area in the country. My contention is that it is a good indicator of how well the US is performing in the one area we are supposed to excel at. I don't think I could even grade this performance unless they're giving out "z's".
"Economic Coma" is appropriate. The whole country is in one. So Mr. Bush, what corner have we turned exactly?
I'm still hoping that I awaken on November 3rd and hear that all the people who have been apathetic about voting, vote Kerry and he wins in a landslide. A landslide is the only meaningful message we could send to the rest of the world.
Silicon Valley added 400 jobs last month. It's only the second monthly job gain since the local economy collapsed back in March 2001, according to payroll data released Monday. While minuscule, the numbers have given some economists hope that the region may be about to emerge from its economic coma. At the same time, observers cautioned that growth will remain slow and that it will be many years -- at best -- before the region recovers the more than 200,000 jobs it lost.
I used to work in the valley. I left right as the dot com disaster was beginning to unfold. Colleagues, at least the ones who could find work, told me that commuting, once a horrific nightmare, was no longer a problem. It doesn't sound like things have changed much. I understand that many people have simply left the area because they couldn't hold on. The valley sports some of the highest cost of living in the country so it takes two incomes to just own a house there typically.
So, lets do the math...800 jobs in 31 months (or 26 jobs/month)...to make up 200,000 jobs would take 7,662 months or 638 years at this rate of growth. Even if we assumed that we could sustain this stellar growth rate from month to month, it would take 498 months or 42 years. Silicon Valley is purportedly the most aggressive and technologically grounded area in the country. My contention is that it is a good indicator of how well the US is performing in the one area we are supposed to excel at. I don't think I could even grade this performance unless they're giving out "z's".
"Economic Coma" is appropriate. The whole country is in one. So Mr. Bush, what corner have we turned exactly?
I'm still hoping that I awaken on November 3rd and hear that all the people who have been apathetic about voting, vote Kerry and he wins in a landslide. A landslide is the only meaningful message we could send to the rest of the world.
posted by Politico at 1:47 PM
6 Comments:
We won't see a landslide victory for John Kerry. In fact, I'm concerned that we won't even see a victory for Kerry over Bush. Too many people either vote straight party lines or believe the shit coming from the Republicans these days.
It's a sad fact that most Americans are sheep; they do what they're told, without thinking of the consequences.
I've got a trip to Japan the day after the elections; I really hope I know who won by the time I get back ten days later.
I have for a long time had my own small collection of metrics that I measure places with - I used to travel to some really wierd and wonderful places, and one of these that has consistently worked well is traffic.
A well jammed city is almost always a sign of a bouncing economy. When a country takes a nosedive, one of the first things you see is the number of cars on the road thinning out.
I used to be able to estimate fairly accurately the journey time from Guarulhos airport to the center of Sao Paulo by checking the Mercantile Gazzete the day before I travelled.
Anyway, the point being that your collegues easy commute is another good example of this. The area might well be a good measure of the economy as a whole, but the traffic is a good measure of the economy of the area.
(spong)
Haha...I just LOVE it when any tiny sign of job growth is seen as a sign that the economy is suddenly going to jump up and start running.
I do not think that silicon valley is ever coming, back, EVER, to be perfectly honest.
I don't blame Bush for all the problems are there were lots of factors leading to it, though I do not think he has helped even slightly by making it easier to outsource and easier to explaoit your employees.
A lot of the growth in silicon valley was just garbage growth - I used to go work in the area as a consultant doing the STUPIDEST things imaginable and getting a really high hourly rate. It will never go back to like it was - where a hopped up web designer with no college education and no real experience could be hired as a 'senior engineer' on a project that should have taken 3 months done by one person but ended up taking 5 years done by 20 people.
With telecommuting and the web in general, there is no need to have everything centralized at the expense of doing business in an area where it costs a million dollars a square acre for land.
Add outsourcing to that and you can forget about it - one thing that they never take into account is immigration when looking at job growth...making 400 jobs in a quarter is probablya ctually the same as losing jobs. And, when you consider we STILL take in upwards of a million H1B programmers every year, I bet that it has gotten successively harder for an entry level programmer to find work.
I know I am not making nearly the money I used to, and many people I used to work with have basically been permanently drummed out of the IT world.
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