Friday--

Big time sports have become the tails that wags the dogs. As another example: the city of St. Louis hasn't yet paid off the bonds issued to build the stadium the Rams are now abandoning to move to Los Angeles. Maybe they should have a provision is contracts with sports teams that if they move before the bonds which build their venues are paid off they are on the hood--not the host city.

Just out of curiosity, yesterday I went to a couple of sites I used to go to when I was looking for work (before I accepted the fact that I was "retired" whether I really wanted to be or not). One site was the on-line edition of the local/regional newspaper and the other was a strictly on-line jobs board. The first listed 13 jobs posted within the last 24 hours and the other only 12. That for a good sized geographic area with a large population and a mix of industries ranging from manufacturing, heavy industry, retail and medical. I had never seen such a paucity of job openings. The pundits say our unemployment rate is down to around 5% which sounds good but the listing I saw are only about one-tenth the job openings of a decade ago when the unemployment rate was around 4.5%. And remember we have added a fair number of people to the working age group. And the labor participation rate is at the lowest point since the late 1970s. I think they have redefined "recovery."

Every time I read a story on the "death of the American Dream" I was thinking, in the back of my mind, we need a new Dream that isn't driven largely by the consumer culture. Evidently a number of people think the same way. I notice that most of the exemplars in the article are young, highly tech savvy people in IT or related fields. But I can't help think that there much be others not in tech fields doing something similar.

Found this by way of Peak Prosperity: job announcement for a Farmer-in-Residence in Staten Island, NY.