6/10/15 Today's Inquiries

Because schedules are for other people...
Also, not much to post that's interesting to me today.

The Links:

Just in case you were's sure about the level of corruption involved in the Trans Pacific Partnership, here are some emails in which a corporate lobbyist is expressing thanks that a Trade Rep passed their preferred rules directly into the text of the trade bill.

The Noble post-White House careers of Obama staffers. Revolving doors gotta revolve.

Here's an answer to a question that I've been wanting for a while. How many people work for large employers (as opposed to small business)? It also breaks down benefits and compensation. The last time I saw any data was for 2010.

Job Tenure, it's not just about Snake People. It would appear that all those blaming "kids these days" for not keeping jobs for the long term aren't aware of the actual trends in employment.

Despite a strong impression that entire careers spent with one employer are a thing of the past, some have declared the image of job-hopping millennials a myth. (You can read some discussions at About.com, CNBC, and Marketwatch, for example.) ...

Declining job tenure is not just all about millennials having short attention spans. In fact, there is a greater (five-year) decline in median job tenure between 41- and 50-year-old "Depression babies" (born in 1933) and 41- to 50-year-old Gen Xers (born in 1973). So, just as our colleagues here at the Atlanta Fed discovered with regard to declines in first-time home mortgages, millennials aren't to blame for everything!

So what does declining job tenure mean for the U.S. labor market? From the perspective of the worker, portable retirement savings and, now, portable health insurance mean that workers confront a world of possibilities that our parents and grandparents never dreamt of. Yes, perhaps the days of predictability in one's career is a thing of the past. But so is the "eggs-in-one-basket" loss of retirement savings when your employer goes out of business as well as potentially slower career progression within a single firm.

The Party of Fiscal Responsibility in Action. It also has a link to Marco Rubio's terrible finances!

Rick Santorum event pulls in a record number of voters, one.

Humiliation as a tool of foreign policy.

Where does ISIS get its guns?

Terrorists and weapons left over from NATO’s intervention in Libya in 2011 were promptly sent to Turkey and then onto Syria – coordinated by US State Department officials and intelligence agencies in Benghazi – a terrorist hotbed for decades.ISIS’ supply lines run precisely where Syrian and Iraqi air power cannot go. To the north and into NATO-member Turkey, and to the southwest into US allies Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Beyond these borders exists a logistical network that spans a region including both Eastern Europe and North Africa.
First appeared:http://journal-neo.org/2015/06/09/logistics-101-where-does-isis-get-its-guns/

More evidence that our much lauded Silicon Valley entrepreneur class are mostly a bunch of child-men. San Francisco tech startups are obsessed with replacing their moms. That's right, why take care of yourself and be organized when your mom phone can do it? Sorry about the slide show.

After yet another HBO-invented scene, Matt Yglesias steps in to challenge the criticism and says the scene was "perfect". Spoilers, obviously.

Keeping black kids out of white pools is an American tradition. Oh racism, is there anything you can't do?

There's a case to be made that the very existence of private pools like the one in McKinney was a response to the end of legal segregation of municipal pools in the late 1940s and early '50s. In other words: many white people preferred to build their own pools than enjoy this type of recreation side by side with their black neighbors.