Internal Monologue

[I]f you’re interested in labor and working conditions, you’ve got to be interested in full employment. Full employment gives workers meaningful leverage. Mass unemployment gives it all to the bosses. In strict dollars and cents terms, I think everyone is better off with prosperity than with sluggish growth. But in terms of power , mass unemployment is a boon to bosses. - Matthew Yglesias Amen. If the market value of a human being's labor is shitty, people will be treated like shit by their employers. If someone can say, "Take this job and shove it!", that's real power for the worker. If an employer can say, "I've got 30 people lined up ready to replace you.", that's real power for the employer. Everything else is fiddling at the margins. I'd take 4% unemployment and free agency over 10% unemployment and labor union backing me up any day of the week. The Federal Reserve's job is to keep both unemployment and inflation low. Low unemploy

This is a good thing: For sheer cynicism it’s hard to top McConnell’s latest bright idea , which is essentially to pass legislation that will give the Obama administration the power to raise the debt ceiling, subject to a 2/3rds over-ride by Congress. The practical effect would be to raise the debt ceiling while allowing Republicans to vote “against” doing so with impunity. Yes, it's a cynical ploy to make Obama look like a bad guy for raising the debt ceiling (to pay for a budget that Congress passes, of course). But it's a total cave on all the policy concessions they were trying to extort from Democrats by holding the economy hostage and threatening to let the US go into default. I'm glad to finally see some movement on this.

The song doesn't start right away, but it's pretty hilarious.

Tom Tomorrow pretty much sums it up.

I forgot where I took this from; I apologize.

xkcd does Hofstadter . A favorite topic of Internal Monologue .

Remember when I said OpenFeint was hiring ? Well, we're hiring even more now . We were recently acquired by GREE, a large and profitable Japanese social networking company. And they want us to grow. Fast. And they have given us a lot of money to do so. Exactly how much is confidential, but it's a lot. If you ever wanted to get into the mobile gaming/social networking universe, now would be a good time. Even if you don't match a job description exactly, I'd encourage you to apply if your overall skills are good. The job I got hired for is actually very different than the one I applied for.