Not necessary to poll every person on this planet to determine statistically valid conclusions.
MM
Still loyal to the SOB, I see. He is without a doubt the most despised national leader in the world at the present time. And yes there a a few like you who seem to have a distorted view of right and wrong who still support him.
i'm sure MM will now want to tour the world to bring us the correct results - bon voyage ! :wink:
hbg
(just a bad joke - nothing more ! if i'd get paid for it , i wouldn't mind going on a worldwide POLLING TOUR
)
cicerone imposter wrote:Not necessary to poll every person on this planet to determine statistically valid conclusions.
But if you are going to claim that a majority of people think anything, or that most people think something, then you need a big enough sample.
Polling a few thousand people in the US is not a big enough sample, especially since there are over 6 billion peopl on the planet.
I am willing to bet that a large percentage of the population of the earth, maybe even a majority, have never heard of George Bush.
So, if thats true, how can any sample claim to include them?
au1929 wrote:MM
Still loyal to the SOB, I see. He is without a doubt the most despised national leader in the world at the present time. And yes there a a few like you who seem to have a distorted view of right and wrong who still support him.
My view of right and wrong is not distorted at all.
Unlike you, I have a strong sense of right and wrong.
And my loyalty is to the US, not one specific person.
MM
Your professed loyalty to the US I should think would preclude support for Bush and his administration.
A few notes that I have to either use or lose before Christmas:
1) Consumer spending rose in Nov while incomes were flat. With a savings rate already in negative territory, we are sinking.
2) The Gap, a chain of clothing stores that is gradually spinning downward, claims that it reduced its holiday buying in order to not have to clear inventory at deeply discounted prices after 12/25. Could be hype, though ("come in quickly, because we only have...")
3) One of my co-workers has a daughter who works during college break for a store that sells chocolate. They were told by corporate HQ to take down the promotional signs ("Buy a pound of this, get a free that"). They are, perhaps, losing sales (I doubt it, does anyone comparrison shop for chocolate for Aunt Miriam) but maintaining profit margins. Smart move.
I went shopping today - and it wasn't crowded at all.
With the rise of the intertubes, that's to be expected to a certain degree; still surprising though. I've been on this day in the past and had it be a truly nightmarish thing, nothing like that today.
Cycloptichorn
Most of the local shooping center parking lots were full, but was surprised that one of our favorite strip mall restaruants, Lee's Sandwiches, was practically empty for lunch - something rarely seen during other times of the year.
Most Americans with internet access buy their gifts online. Why not?
Retailers are hoping for a surge in sales during the last days before christams, but IMHO they are going to be disappointed.
Retailers nervous on last weekend before Christmas
NEW YORK (AP) ?- The nation's shoppers ?- taking advantage of deep discounts and expanded hours ?- jammed stores over the last weekend before Christmas to try to grab a hard-to-find Wii or scoop up bargains on other items. But the spending surge may not be enough to offset what is shaping up to be a mediocre December for some retailers.
Based on early reports on Sunday, mall operators including Macerich Co. said they were pleased with the spending spree over the weekend, but they were still counting on Christmas Eve and post-Christmas business to meet holiday sales goals in what has turned out to be a nail biter of a season.
Meanwhile, even as shoppers continued to snap up flat-screen TVs, video game software and other gadgets, benefiting stores like Best Buy Co., the apparel business remains challenging, analysts said.
Ed Schmults, chief executive of toy merchant FAO Schwarz, which operates stores in Chicago and New York, said Sunday that pre-Christmas business is below expectations despite a sales surge this weekend.
"It's almost kind of worth waiting and shifting through the hustle and bustle," said Carly Moore, of Chicago, who was heading to Macy's on the city's State Street shopping corridor to scoop up some discounted clothing. But she was still frustrated that she couldn't find Nintendo's Wii game console, after trying at least five stores.
Valerie Glodowski of Stevens Point, Wis., who was with her boyfriend at Wisconsin's Wausau Center Mall, said she started holiday shopping two weeks ago and waited until the last weekend to finish out of sheer laziness.
"I am just winging it," she said.
Many merchants, which had struggled through a sluggish December after a strong start to the season, are counting even more on the final days before Christmas to make their holiday goals. With the three days prior to Christmas accounting for as much as 15% of holiday sales, there's a lot of business left on the table.
Macy's Inc. is keeping several of its stores in the New York metropolitan area, including its flagship store in Herald Square, open until 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve. About 1,000 of Sears Holdings Corp.'s 1,387 Kmart stores are open for 64 hours straight, beginning at 6 a.m. Saturday and ending at 10 p.m. on Dec. 24, for the first time since 2002.
With Christmas falling on a Tuesday, shoppers were enticed to wait even longer this season to finish their holiday shopping. A challenging economy ?- higher gas prices and a housing slump ?- also made some shoppers hold off until the final days before the holiday. Retailers routinely discount items deeper as Christmas draws nearer.
"The gas prices and car insurance ... is up. I would say I'm spending less and worrying more about it," said Sondra Newton, of Warren, Mich., who was at Oakland Mall in Troy, Mich., a suburb outside of Detroit on Friday. "I used to just take their (her children's) list and get the top ones on it. Now I have to think about 'what can I get at the best deal."'
Nevertheless, Michael P. Niemira, chief economist at International Council of Shopping Centers, is sticking with his December forecast for a 1.5% gain in same-store sales, or sales at stores opened at least a year. That would mean same-stores sales for the November-December period would be up 2.5% from a year ago.
"I think when the dust settles, stores will have met expectations, though they are modest," said Bill Martin, co-founder of ShopperTrak RCT Corp., which tracks total sales at more than 50,000 retail outlets. He said he is still sticking with his 3.6% forecast for the November and December period, though he added, "some retailers will do OK, and others won't."
Krugman: The trouble with trade
Quote:By Paul Krugman Published: December 28, 2007
PRINCETON, New Jersey: While the United States has long imported oil and other raw materials from the third world, we used to import manufactured goods mainly from other rich countries like Canada, European nations and Japan.
But recently we crossed an important watershed: We now import more manufactured goods from the third world than from other advanced economies. That is, a majority of our industrial trade is now with countries that are much poorer than we are and that pay their workers much lower wages.
For the world economy as a whole - and especially for poorer nations - growing trade between high-wage and low-wage countries is a very good thing. Above all, it offers backward economies their best hope of moving up the income ladder.
But for American workers the story is much less positive. In fact, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that growing U.S. trade with third world countries reduces the real wages of many and perhaps most workers in this country. And that reality makes the politics of trade very difficult.
Let's talk for a moment about the economics.
Trade between high-wage countries tends to be a modest win for all, or almost all, concerned. When a free-trade pact made it possible to integrate the U.S. and Canadian auto industries in the 1960s, each country's industry concentrated on producing a narrower range of products at larger scale. The result was an all-round, broadly shared rise in productivity and wages.
By contrast, trade between countries at very different levels of economic development tends to create large classes of losers as well as winners.
Although the outsourcing of some high-tech jobs to India has made headlines, on balance, highly educated workers in the United States benefit from higher wages and expanded job opportunities because of trade. For example, ThinkPad notebook computers are made by a Chinese company, Lenovo, but a lot of Lenovo's research and development is conducted in North Carolina.
But workers with less formal education either see their jobs shipped overseas or find their wages driven down by the ripple effect as other workers with similar qualifications crowd into their industries and look for employment to replace the jobs they lost to foreign competition. And lower prices at Wal-Mart aren't sufficient compensation.
All this is textbook international economics: Contrary to what people sometimes assert, economic theory says that free trade normally makes a country richer, but it doesn't say that it's normally good for everyone. Still, when the effects of third-world exports on U.S. wages first became an issue in the 1990s, a number of economists - myself included - looked at the data and concluded that any negative effects on American wages were modest.
The trouble is that these effects may no longer be as modest as they were, because imports of manufactured goods from the third world have grown dramatically - from just 2.5 percent of GDP in 1990 to 6 percent in 2006.
And the biggest growth in imports has come from countries with very low wages. The original "newly industrializing economies" exporting manufactured goods - South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore - paid wages that were about 25 percent of U.S. levels in 1990. Since then, however, the sources of U.S. imports have shifted to Mexico, where wages are only 11 percent of the U.S. level, and China, where they're only about 3 percent or 4 percent.
There are some qualifying aspects to this story. For example, many of those made-in-China goods contain components made in Japan and other high-wage economies. Still, there's little doubt that the pressure of globalization on American wages has increased.
So am I arguing for protectionism? No. Those who think that globalization is always and everywhere a bad thing are wrong. On the contrary, keeping world markets relatively open is crucial to the hopes of billions of people.
But I am arguing for an end to the finger-wagging, the accusation either of not understanding economics or of kowtowing to special interests that tends to be the editorial response to politicians who express skepticism about the benefits of free-trade agreements.
It's often claimed that limits on trade benefit only a small number of Americans, while hurting the vast majority. That's still true of things like the import quota on sugar. But when it comes to manufactured goods, it's at least arguable that the reverse is true. The highly educated workers who clearly benefit from growing trade with third-world economies are a minority, greatly outnumbered by those who probably lose.
An Awakening
As I said, I'm not a protectionist. For the sake of the world as a whole, I hope that we Americans respond to the trouble with trade not by shutting trade down, but by doing things like strengthening the social safety net. But those who are worried about trade have a point, and deserve some respect.
What Americans need do, first and foremost is to repond to the economic threat to the it's citizens.
au, That's a very good article, but my thinking is that our economy is sustained more by what the current levels of income is compared to all other developed and developing countries. In other words, those in most of the domestic economy will continue to earn the "average" income based on the area and cost of living index.
It also depends on the competitiveness of the industry or company doing business in this international world marketplace. Their salaries will probably remain more static if the product and services they offer doesn't compete well.
I also believe in a world free market place. Protectionism only ends up hurting the country that attempts to protect one product or industry. I've seen this happen to Japan and rice prices. They tried to protect their rice farmers, but everybody in Japan ended up paying more for rice.
Joint ventures with many countries is the future of the world economy. Any country attempting to isolate itself from the world economy will suffer.
Our countries biggest problems are a) the increasing amount of debt by both consumers and the government, b) our educational system not producing enough math and science students, and c) spending billions of dollars in other countries, and doing less to keep up our own infrastructure and health.
If something is not done soon, we will fall behind faster and deeper to the point a recovery will be more difficult to accomplsih.
Is CI looking for a little part-time job to help him make ends meet?? :wink:
Miller
Here is a cut and paste
"The Washington Post had a good story on the dealings of the electronics retailer Circuit City. Unfortunately, it was buried in the business section where no one will see it. It should have been plastered at the top of the front page.
The basic story is that last March, the wise men who run Circuit City came up with the brilliant idea of laying off their more senior salespeople, who get $14-$15 an hour, and replacing them with new hires who get around $9 an hour. It turns out that this move was not very good for business. One of the reasons that people go to a store like Circuit City, rather than buying things on the Internet, is that they want to be able to talk to a knowledgeable salesperson. Since Circuit City had laid off their knowledgeable salespeople, there was little reason to shop there.
Apparently Circuit City came to this same conclusion earlier this fall and tried to hire back some of the people it had dumped. In any case, things have not gone well for the bottom line. The company is now losing money and its share price is down more than 75 percent from its value earlier this year.
We all know what happens when you mess up in the dog eat dog world of big business -- you get retention awards (that's because your stock options aren't worth anything). The Post reports that Circuit City's executive vice-presidents will get retention awards of $1 million each. That's 35 years worth of pay for one of sales clerks who earned $14 an hour. And that's just the bonus.
This touching account of Santa Claus visiting Circuit City's executive suites belonged on the front page of the Post and every other newspaper. What better way to get in the Christmas spirit?
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=12&year=2007&base_name=sanata_claus_comes_for_failed#103356
Miller wrote:Is CI looking for a little part-time job to help him make ends meet?? :wink:
+
No, Miller, we are doing just fine - comparatively speaking. Our retirement investments ended 2007 with a 5.8 percent increase. The two year average is 6.78 percent, and the three year average is 8.1 percent.
Although the 2007 increase excludes all of our spending, the two and three year averages is net after spending. We had unusually high expenditures in 2007, because I purchased a new car and we had over $30K in dental expenses - all paid by cash. I also traveled seven times in 2007.
As for residential values, our's is one of the few in our area that continues to show value increases when most of the country are showing decreases.
We are in no danger of my having to return to work.
Ho-ho-horrible: album sales plunge 20 percent this Christmas
By Nate Anderson | Published: December 31, 2007 - 04:59AM CT
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071231-ho-ho-horrible-music-sales-plunge-20-percent-this-christmas.html
cicerone imposter wrote:Miller wrote:Is CI looking for a little part-time job to help him make ends meet?? :wink:
+
No, Miller, we are doing just fine - comparatively speaking. Our retirement investments ended 2007 with a 5.8 percent increase. The two year average is 6.78 percent, and the three year average is 8.1 percent.
Although the 2007 increase excludes all of our spending, the two and three year averages is net after spending. We had unusually high expenditures in 2007, because I purchased a new car and we had over $30K in dental expenses - all paid by cash. I also traveled seven times in 2007.
As for residential values, our's is one of the few in our area that continues to show value increases when most of the country are showing decreases.
We are in no danger of my having to return to work.
Why would you call "work" a danger?
"Work" is danger to a senior like me who enjoys retirement.
