PPCC - Pisitófilos Creditófagos - PRiMaVeRa 2021

[Derby]

Resulta que se está generalizando en UK (al menos en Londres con empleadores 'comprometidos') el escribir el genero de los pronombres por los que quieres que te traten. Empezó hace algun tiempo con la petición de grupos de transexuales / transgeneros / fluidos / lo que sea, de que se refirieran a ellos en plural, o sea  'they' y 'them'. No hace falta haber cambiado de sexo. Simplemente hay gente que dice que no quiere que se refieran a el o ella usando 'he' o 'she' sino que hay que usar 'they'. Pues bueno.

Pues sí, como bien sabes, es lo que se denomina "non-binary". Ya está llegando a España. Hay un técnico que en el gimnasio al que voy que nos saluda al empezar la clase: "¡Hola chicos, chicas, "chiques"!" 

Pero es que en el ámbito de la administración pública (concretamente de la Generalitat de Catalunya), ya me he encontrado con algún formulario donde hay que indicar, marcando la casilla correspondiente, si eres hombre, mujer o no binario....

[Derby]

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/13/more-than-1-million-will-lose-unemployment-benefits-early-in-13-states.html

More than 1 million Americans will lose supplemental unemployment benefits in 14 states

As of Thursday, at least 14 Republican-led states opted out of federal unemployment programs. The decisions will impact more than 1 million people.

Workers in those states are poised to lose a $300 weekly supplement to unemployment benefits. Some, like the long-term unemployed and gig workers, will lose aid entirely.

The states include Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and Wyoming.

[R.G.C.I.M.]

Hay tipos que se liman los dientes,  se tatuan la cara debfelino y se operan el labio para partirlo.
Deberían denunciar e impugnar por discriminación habla administración por mo incluirles su casilla.

Hombre
Mujer
No binario.
Felino.

El siguiente lo haría por autodefinirse ofidio, que también los hay.

Y luego nuestro primer embarazo de juan-ita,  con barba y bombo. Quiero ser hombre pero antes quiero parir.
No se lo creerán,  pero en 1994 me explotó la cabeza porque viviendo en L.A. en un talk show salía exactamente esa situación y yo pensé que era la caída de Roma, pero luego que eran actores para dar salsa a la audiencia.



La única vez que gané a la administración fue por saturar la con más documentos de los que me exigía y que cruzababdstos con otros departamento e implicaba otros derechos.

Hay veces que perdería las manos de las bofetadas a dos que empezaba a soltar por el mundo. A lo espantapajaros girando.

Es la libertad, hamijos!

[sudden and sharp]

Saludos, siempretarde. Macro-urbes, pero al final todo es tan parecido...

Por cambiar así de tercio y tal.

Estaba leyendo en el Pais este artículo y me hizo gracia porque hace unos días he tenido una sesión de entrenamiento en el uso políticamente correcto de los pronombres para referirme a personas que trabajan conmigo.

https://elpais.com/sociedad/2021-05-13/eln-signo-ortografico-se-convierte-en-el-campo-de-batalla-por-la-escritura-inclusiva-en-francia.html
Mas o menos quieren eliminar el uso de (*) al escribir, que es el equivalente francés a (/) en 'los madrileños/as (son unos lloromicas/os )

Estuve por traerlo yo... pero me dio pereza tener que buscar el puntito elevado de la "ele geminada" (o algo así...)

El caso es que ahora sé que se llama: punt volat.

En los ordenadores con Windows o Mac OS que dispongan de teclado español, el punt volat se genera pulsando MAYÚS+3.

> Con teclados distintos se puede generar pulsando ALT+0183 (es decir, pulsando la secuencia 0183 en el teclado numérico —pero no en la fila superior del teclado alfanumérico— mientras se mantiene pulsada la tecla ALT). Eso se debe a que el punt volat corresponde al carácter informático Unicode U+00B7.

[ Me hacéis trabajar c*br***s.  ]

[Derby]

https://wolfstreet.com/2021/05/12/its-getting-serious-dollars-purchasing-power-plunges-most-since-2007-but-its-a-lot-worse-than-it-appears/

It’s Getting Serious: Dollar’s Purchasing Power Plunges Most since 2007. But it’s a Lot Worse than it Appears

Fed officials, economists “surprised” by surge in CPI inflation, but we’ve seen it for months, including “scary-crazy” inflation in some corners.

[Juan]

Resulta que se está generalizando en UK (al menos en Londres con empleadores 'comprometidos') el escribir el genero de los pronombres por los que quieres que te traten. Empezó hace algun tiempo con la petición de grupos de transexuales / transgeneros / fluidos / lo que sea, de que se refirieran a ellos en plural, o sea  'they' y 'them'. No hace falta haber cambiado de sexo. Simplemente hay gente que dice que no quiere que se refieran a el o ella usando 'he' o 'she' sino que hay que usar 'they'. Pues bueno.

Solo una cosita, Maloserá, ese they/them no es plural. He/him, she/her, they/them. Es raro porque los no nativos (y muchos nativos también) han aprendido que they es el plural, pero se usa desde hace mucho tiempo (y ha habido otros, como thon, que no han cuajado - y hablamos de 1934, no de 2010). Te dejo un link en wikipedia para que puedas verlo, como curiosidad. Se ve que hasta Shakespeare lo usaba... Yo por lo pronto sigo siendo he/him

Por lo demás, hacía eones que no entraba, he sido un poco lurker y madre mía, qué degeneración más absoluta. Y lo digo como madrileño, eh. Nuestro procesismo da tanta grima (personalmente más, porque veo la pudrición cerebral de cerca) como el catalán. No me extraña que estéis, en el resto de España, hasta las gónadas de nosotros. Razón no os falta.

Edit: Piensa en esta frase: «Somebody left their coat here!». Esa seguro que no te suena rara, y no dirías his coat o her coat. Pues ese their es el equivalente del they.

[sudden and sharp]

Resulta que se está generalizando en UK (al menos en Londres con empleadores 'comprometidos') el escribir el genero de los pronombres por los que quieres que te traten. Empezó hace algun tiempo con la petición de grupos de transexuales / transgeneros / fluidos / lo que sea, de que se refirieran a ellos en plural, o sea  'they' y 'them'. No hace falta haber cambiado de sexo. Simplemente hay gente que dice que no quiere que se refieran a el o ella usando 'he' o 'she' sino que hay que usar 'they'. Pues bueno.

Solo una cosita, Maloserá, ese they/them no es plural. He/him, she/her, they/them. Es raro porque los no nativos (y muchos nativos también) han aprendido que they es el plural, pero se usa desde hace mucho tiempo (y ha habido otros, como thon, que no han cuajado - y hablamos de 1934, no de 2010). Te dejo un link en wikipedia para que puedas verlo, como curiosidad. Se ve que hasta Shakespeare lo usaba... Yo por lo pronto sigo siendo he/him

Por lo demás, hacía eones que no entraba, he sido un poco lurker y madre mía, qué degeneración más absoluta. Y lo digo como madrileño, eh. Nuestro procesismo da tanta grima (personalmente más, porque veo la pudrición cerebral de cerca) como el catalán. No me extraña que estéis, en el resto de España, hasta las gónadas de nosotros. Razón no os falta.

Ahora tendríamos que --por pura ortodoxia--; tacharde de auto-odio... pero nos lo vamos a ahorrar. Nadie se auto-odia en su auto-odio reflexivo per se, más que en el barrio de al lado..., pero en el mio no tenemos de eso. Cosas de probes. 

[Derby]

https://thesoundingline.com/the-wrong-kind-of-inflation-again/

The Wrong Kind of Inflation, Again…

Exactly why the Fed and other central banks have become so obsessed with inflation targeting is the subject of much debate as none have shown why exactly 2% PCE inflation at all times, in all developed economies would be optimal for growth, employment, or anything quantitative.

Personally, I subscribe to the explanation that central banks themselves tend to offer up. They believe that having inflation in the ballpark of 2% gives them the space to provide negative real rates without having negative nominal interest rates and outright wage deflation during recessions. That is not to say that ‘exactly-2%-at-all-times-for-all-conditions’ is optimal for the economy. It simply makes monetary policy more ‘pleasant.’ It minimizes negative signs on financial asset performance and avoids deflation, the kryptonite of big banks through whose lens the Fed views the world. Of course, to make achieving 2% inflation the objective of monetary policy because 2% inflation makes monetary policy easier creates a classically ‘post-modern’ self-referential loop void of deeper meaning.

As it were, non-central bankers understand that inflation driven by rising wages and a strong economy operating at full capacity is different than inflation produced by print-and-spend economic policies and incentivizing people not to work in an economy operating well below capacity. The former evokes thoughts of an economic boom. The latter evokes thoughts of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. It’s not hard to spot the difference.

The chart below, via Oxford Economics’ Gregory Daco, sums up the difference between wage driven inflation and price inflation.



From late 2015 until Covid, the economy was able to generate the fastest inflation adjusted increase in median household income on record while simultaneously tolerating (barely at times) several interest rate hikes, a reduction in the Fed’s balance sheet, and a trade war with China. That was a period of wage-driven inflation.

Today’s inflation is the kind where companies are raising prices faster than wages. That, by definition, is going to give people that rely on their wages (as opposed to surging government transfer payments or investments) a sense that they are falling behind economically. They’ll feel that way because that’s exactly what’s happening to them.

We all now know how people react to years of inflation outpacing wages while central bankers and politicians tell them that the economy is doing great and financial markets surge endlessly, because that’s precisely what happened the last time we kept interest rates at zero for years and did QE program after QE program, swelled the deficit, told people inflation didn’t exist or didn’t matter, and masked the need for actual pro-growth economic reform.

[Derby]

https://ritholtz.com/2021/05/finding-it-hard-to-hire-try-raising-your-wages/

Finding it Hard to Hire? Try Raising Your Wages



(...) Which leads to the obvious question “Why are Job Openings so hard to fill?”

Start with the pandemic externality making this a rather unusual cycle. But it is a lot more than that: On the high end of technical + technology workers, we have a shortage of people with the right skills and education for those jobs. At the low end you have wages that have simply lagged for decades, and reached the point where they are too low for most Americans. These used to be filled regularly by immigrants and non-citizens, but their numbers have fallen over the past few years. You can’t blame all of this on Trump — it goes back further than that as deportations peaked under Obama in 2013.  The mix of restricted immigration and increased deportations has created shortages at the lower end of the labor market.

If the Demand for workers is there, why hasn’t the supply caught up yet? The short answer is Price. Employers have been reluctant to raise wages. This is classic problem where buyers and sellers get anchored on some past level, failing to keep up with the realities of markets.2

The old trader cliché “More Buyers than Sellers” often omits the phrase “at this price level.” 3 For any trade to occur there must always be at least one seller for each buyer (and vice versa); once there are no more sellers at a specific price level, if you want to find more stock for sale, you must look at higher price levels.

After several decades of lagging prices for low wage labor, I believe what we are witnessing is something very similar. THERE IS NO MORE LABOR FOR SALE AT $7/HOUR; so the price moves up. Once it moves up high enough so that supply matches with demand, you get a stabilization at that level.

In this morning’s reads was this Pittsburgh Business Times on a few stores that cracked the code for finding workers: The TL:DR was they doubled their starting wages from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour. Instead of getting a few applicants per position, half of whom wouldn’t show for the interview, they got 1,000s: “It was instant, overnight. We got thousands of applications that poured in. [And, it led to getting] quality work from people when they know that they are going to make a good paycheck.”

This was obvious 5 years ago — see Can’t Find Qualified Applicants? Raise Your Pay!, — and even further back if you looked in the right places. Indeed, it was what I was referencing last month when I discussed the Shifting Balance of Power. My experience is that People want to work. They want to have a job where they feel they are doing something meaningful, are appreciated, and are appropriately compensated for their time and labors.

In the immediate aftermath of World War 2, there was such overwhelming demand for goods and services and workers, that good jobs at good wages were plentiful. Everybody worked, consumer demand was met, stocks went higher, everybody won.4

Capitalism is an excellent system for creating wealth and getting products and services to where they are most wanted/needed; however, in its unfettered form, it also gave us child labor and slavery. Hence, this is not a market failure, but rather, what we are witnessing is the failure of the political and regulatory systems to create the appropriate minimum wage. Once they do, Capital will become more efficient, Businesses will innovate, automate, and find ways to make higher wages work. So too will Labor adapt — becoming more productive, better educated and more skillful over time.

It has taken a while for this to reach a point where all of these forces have made their way down the economic strata to the minimum wage cohort. That is what is going on right now. $7 an hour is so yesterday; $10 hour seems cheap but its actually expensive once you factor in poor candidates and high turnover rates.

Wages have lagged just about every measure over the past 40 years: CPI Inflation, Health care and education costs, productivity, corporate profits, C Suite compensation, even the number of billionaires seems to be growing faster than wages.

Want to hire qualified candidates who will fill jobs, generate revenue, create profits, and lower your overall cost structure? Perhaps you should consider offering higher starting wages.

[cujo]

Burbuja se forocochizó
Ahora transicion se burbujiza.

Seamos caballeros.

[sudden and sharp]

[...] Seamos caballeros.

¿Caballeros...? Si empezamos a faltar...     




Esto es la isla pirata. (La del tesoro..., no "esa otra".)

[Derby]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/business/economy/middle-class-pay.html

Middle-Class Pay Lost Pace. Is Washington to Blame?

A new paper by liberal economists presents evidence that policymakers helped hold down wages for four decades.

One of the most urgent questions in economics is why pay for middle-income workers has increased only slightly since the 1970s, even as pay for those near the top has escalated.

For years, the rough consensus among economists was that inexorable forces like technology and globalization explained much of the trend. But in a new paper, Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens, economists at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, conclude that government is to blame. “Intentional policy decisions (either of commission or omission) have generated wage suppression,” they write.

Included among these decisions are policymakers’ willingness to tolerate high unemployment and to let employers fight unions aggressively; trade deals that force workers to compete with low-paid labor abroad; and the tacit or explicit blessing of new legal arrangements, like employment contracts that make it harder for workers to seek new jobs.

Together, Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens argue, these developments deprived workers of bargaining power, which kept their wages low.

“If you think about a person who’s dissatisfied with their situation, what are their options?” Dr. Mishel said. “Almost every possibility has been foreclosed. You can’t quit and get a good-quality job. If you try to organize a union, it’s not so easy.”

The slowdown in workers’ pay increases happened rather abruptly. From the late 1940s to the early 1970s, hourly compensation for the typical worker grew roughly as quickly as productivity. If the value of the goods and services that workers provided rose by 2 percent in a year, then their wages and benefits tended to go up by roughly 2 percent as well.

Since then, productivity has continued to grow, while hourly compensation largely flattened. According to the paper, the typical worker earned $23.15 an hour in 2017, far less than the $33.10 that worker would have earned had compensation kept up with productivity growth.

In the 1980s and 1990s, economists increasingly argued that technology largely explained this flattening of wages. They said computers were making workers without college degrees less valuable to employers, while college graduates were becoming more valuable. At the same time, the growth in the number of college graduates was slowing. These developments dragged down wages for those in the middle of the income distribution (like factory workers) and increased wages for those near the top (like software engineers).

The technology thesis largely relied on a standard economic analysis: As the demand for lower-skilled workers dropped, their wages grew less quickly. But in recent years, many economists have gradually de-emphasized this explanation, focusing more on the balance of power between workers and employers than on long-term shifts in supply and demand.


The idea is that setting pay amounts to dividing the wealth that workers and employers create together. Workers can claim more of this wealth when institutions like unions give them leverage. They receive less when they lose such leverage.

Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens argue that a decades-long loss of leverage largely explains the gap between the pay increases that workers would have received had they benefited fully from rising productivity, and the smaller wage and benefit increases that workers actually received.

To arrive at this conclusion, they examine numerical measures of the impact of several developments that hurt workers’ bargaining power — some of which they generated, many of which other economists have generated over the years — then sum up those measures to arrive at an overall effect.

For example, when surveying the economic literature on the unemployment rate, Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens find that it was frequently below the so-called natural rate — the rate below which economists believe a tight job market could cause inflation to accelerate uncontrollably — in the three decades after World War II, but frequently above the natural rate in the last four decades.

This is partly because the Federal Reserve began to put more emphasis on fighting inflation once Paul Volcker became chairman in 1979, and partly because of the failure of state and federal governments to provide more economic stimulus after the Great Recession of 2007-9.

Drawing on existing measures of the relationship between unemployment and wages, Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens estimate that this excess unemployment lowered wages by about 10 percent since the 1970s, explaining nearly one-quarter of the gap between wages and productivity growth.

They perform similar exercises for other factors that undermined workers’ bargaining power: the decline of unions; a succession of trade deals with low-wage countries; and increasingly common arrangements like “fissuring,” in which companies outsource work to lower-paying firms, and noncompete clauses in employment contracts, which make it hard for workers to leave for a competitor.

Together, Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens conclude, these factors explain more than three-quarters of the gap between the typical worker’s actual increases in compensation and their expected increases, given the productivity gains.

If that figure is in the right ballpark, it is a crucial insight. Underlying most of the explanations for anemic wages that Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens cite is the idea that wage growth depends on policy choices, not on the march of technology or other irreversible developments. Government officials could have worried less about inflation and erred on the side of lower unemployment when setting interest rates and passing economic stimulus. They could have cracked down on employers that aggressively fought unions or foisted noncompete agreements onto fast-food workers.

And if policymakers are to blame for wage stagnation, they can also do a lot to reverse it — and more quickly than many economists once assumed. Among other things, the conclusion of the paper would suggest that President Biden, who has enacted a large economic stimulus and sought to increase union membership, may be on the right track.

“One of the biggest things about the American Rescue Plan,” said Dr. Mishel, referring to the pandemic relief bill Mr. Biden signed, “is first and foremost its commitment to getting to full employment quickly. It’s willing to risk overheating.”

So is the paper’s number plausible? The short answer from other economists was that it pointed in the right direction, but may have overshot its mark.

“My sense is that things like fissuring, noncompetes have become very important in the 2000s, along with unions that have gotten to the point where they’re so weak,” said Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard who is a longtime proponent of the idea that the higher wages earned by college graduates have increased inequality.

But Dr. Katz, who has also written about unions and other reasons that workers have lost leverage, said the portion of the wage gap that Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens attribute to such factors probably overstated their impact.

The reason, he said, is that their effects can’t simply be added up. If excessive unemployment explains 25 percent of the gap and weaker unions explain 20 percent, it is not necessarily the case that they combine to explain 45 percent of the gap, as Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens imply. The effects overlap somewhat.

Dr. Katz added that education plays a complementary role to bargaining power in determining wages, citing a historical increase in wages for Black workers as an example. In the first several decades of the 20th century, philanthropists and the N.A.A.C.P. worked to improve educational opportunities for Black students in the South. That helped raise wages once a major policy change — the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — increased workers’ power.

“Education by itself wasn’t enough given the Jim Crow apartheid system,” Dr. Katz said. “But it’s not clear you could have gotten the same increase in wages if there had not been earlier activism to provide education.”

Daron Acemoglu, an M.I.T. economist who has studied the effects of technology on wages and employment, said Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens were right to push the field to think more deeply about how institutions like unions affect workers’ bargaining power.

But he said they were too dismissive of the role of market forces like the demand for skilled workers, noting that even as the so-called college premium has mostly flattened over the last two decades, the premium for graduate degrees has continued to increase, most likely contributing to inequality.

Still, other economists cautioned that it was important not to lose sight of the overall trend that Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens highlight. “There is just an increasing body of work trying to quantify both the direct and indirect effects of declining worker bargaining power,” said Anna Stansbury, the co-author of a well-received paper on the subject with former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. After receiving her doctorate, she will join the faculty of the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management this fall.

“Whether it explains three-quarters or one-half” of the slowdown in wage growth, she continued, “for me the evidence is very compelling that it’s a nontrivial amount.”

https://www.epi.org/unequalpower/publications/wage-suppression-inequality/

[Cadavre Exquis]

Es todo surrealistamente delicioso. Los que querían que se les tratasen como iguales, pidiendo que les traten diferente. Y pidiendo a los demás que cambien para ser iguales otra vez.

A leerle no he podido evitar acordarme de "The Sneetches", la primera de una serie de historias para niños creadas por Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel).

Dr Seuss' The Sneetches

Diría que hasta un niño de tres años puede comprenderlo. Puede que no estuviese de más el que lo viesen algunos (supuestos) adultos para que se diesen cuenta de lo absurdo que resulta el defender la igualdad buscando ser diferente.

Saludos.

[Derby]

https://dailyshotbrief.com/the-daily-shot-brief-may-13th-2021/

United States: The CPI report massively overshot market expectations.

[Maloserá]

..
Edit: Piensa en esta frase: «Somebody left their coat here!». Esa seguro que no te suena rara, y no dirías his coat o her coat. Pues ese their es el equivalente del they.

Si, la persona que hizo la presentación puso un ejemplo similar. Precisamente para demostrar que no era raro - en una audiencia de nativos. Acusatio non petita... La idea es la misma que en el ejemplo. No se expresa género porque en un caso no se 'tiene' (no binarios) o no se sabe el genero de quien se ha olvidado la cazadora (somebody). Porque si se sabe, entonces se dices (Maloserá left his coat here!). A no ser que no estés seguro de si Maloserá, viviendo tanto tiempo en un pais de pervertidos se ha vuelto de sexualidad fluida, claro

Anyway, mi problema no es llamar a la persona 'they' o usar el plural (aunque se haga forzado). Mi problema es que me hacen posicionarme  en una guerra cultural, tanto si firmo los emails con mis pronombres (me posiciono entonces como cool, laborista, de ciudad, remainer, lector del Guardian) como si no lo hago (Brexiter + Borisiano, Tory, anticuado, machista, racista, y aun peor porque el capullo aun por encima es europeo ... ya hay que ser tonto)

Estoy seguro que en unas semanas vamos a tener los pronombres en los email todos. Nos guste o no.

Después se preguntan los laboristas por qué la clase trabajadora británica del Norte de Inglaterra está votando a un conservador que estudió en el colegio de Eton.