Thursday 16 May 2013
polistat
Saturday 11 May 2013
Friday 12 April 2013
Tuesday 9 April 2013
Why Own a Gun? Protection Is Now Top Reason ☀
A national survey finds that nearly half of gun owners (48%) volunteer that the main reason they own a gun is for protection; just 32% say they have a gun primarily for hunting and even fewer cite other reasons, such as target shooting. In 1999, 49% said they owned a gun mostly for hunting, while just 26% cited protection as the biggest factor.
Thursday 4 April 2013
Wages stink at America's most common jobs ☀
Workers in seven of the 10 largest occupations typically earn less than $30,000 a year, according to new data published Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a far cry from the nation’s average annual pay of $45,790.
Food prep workers are the third most-common job in the U.S., but have the lowest pay, at a mere $18,720 a year for 2012. Cashiers and waiters are also popular professions, but the average pay at these jobs tallies up to less than $21,000 annually. There are 4.3 million retail sales workers out there, making them the most common job, but the position pays only $25,310 for the year.
Among the 10 most popular professions, only the nation’s 2.6 million registered nurses earn a good living, bringing home nearly $68,000 a year on average. Another two of the most common jobs — secretaries and customer service representatives — have an average annual wage of about $33,000.
Wages have been in the spotlight this year as the debate over income inequality intensified. Middle-class Americans have been losing ground, as median household income dropped by more than $4,000 since 2000.
Part of this decline stems from a disappearance of middle-class jobs and an explosion of lower-paying ones. Some 58% of the jobs created during the recovery have been low-wage positions, according to a 2012 report by the National Employment Law Project. These low-wage jobs had a median hourly wage of $13.83 or less.
Thursday 14 February 2013
Older Jobless Workers Face Unhealthy Bias ☀
America’s latest economic crisis is paralyzing an entire generation.
What should be done with the estimated 2 million older job seekers who often are the victims of subtle discrimination, but have no real legal ways to defend themselves?
Sara Rix of the AARP’s Public Policy Institute said, in April 2012, that the job seekers 55 years old and above had been out of work for an average of 60 weeks; those under 55, an average 38.5 weeks.
Meanwhile there is a push in Congress to raise the Medicare age to 67, which really is a way to cut Medicare benefits.
Monday 11 February 2013
Wednesday 6 February 2013
The zombie infant mortality explanation ☀
The high rate of adverse birth outcomes in the United States does not appear to be a statistical artifact, such as a difference in coding practices for very small infants who die soon after birth (MacDorman and Mathews, 2009). Indeed, country rankings remained identical even when Palloni and Yonker (2012) recalculated the rates to exclude preterm births (less than 22 weeks of gestation).
Tuesday 5 February 2013
Saturday 26 January 2013
Tuesday 22 January 2013
MLK Injustice Index 2013 ☀
The chairman of Goldman Sachs was awarded $21 million in total pay for 2012 according to the Wall Street Journal.
From 1978 to 2011, compensation for workers grew by 5.7 percent. During the same time, CEO compensation grew by 725 percent. In 1965 CEO earned about 20 times the typical worker. In 2011, the typical CEO “earned” over 200 times the typical worker.
The top 1% of earners took home 93% of the growth in incomes in 2010, while middle income household have lower incomes than they did in 1996, according to Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.
People in the US spent $52 billion on pets in 2012, according to the American Pet Products Association. The latest figures from the Census Bureau indicate the US spends less than $50 billion per year in non-military foreign aid.
Student loan debt is now higher than total credit card debt and total auto loan debt.
Over 2.8 million children in the US live in homes of extreme poverty, less than $2 per person per day before government benefits. This is double what it was 15 years ago.
Nearly one in six people in the US live in poverty according to the Census. One in five children live in poverty. Latest information shows 17% of white children in poverty, 32% of Hispanic children and 35% of black children.
Monday 21 January 2013
But a college education is still worth it, even after all that. Why? Well, for starters, the unemployment rate in December of 2012 was just 3.9 percent for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher, but it was 8 percent for high school graduates, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Workers with a four-year degree can expect to make almost twice as much as high-school graduates — a $45,648 average yearly salary versus $23,233 a year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Danny Levi: College Is Expensive, But Still Worth It ☀
Friday 18 January 2013
Lessons From Guns and a Goose ☀
One study, reported in Southern Medical Journal in 2010, found that a gun is 12 times more likely to result in the death of a household member or guest than in the death of an intruder. Another study in 1993 found that gun ownership creates nearly a threefold risk of a homicide in the owner’s household.
Far too many Americans are like Nancy Lanza, who may have thought that her guns would make her safer, and then was killed with them. Something similar happened in Yamhill, where a troubled teenager took a gun that his grandmother owned and shot her dead. The N.R.A. is right that most guns are used safely, but it’s also true that guns are more likely to cause tragedies than to avert them.
President Obama said that there have been 900 violent gun deaths since Sandy Hook, but that was a rare error. He perhaps was speaking of gun homicides only, but he should also include gun suicides — which are even more common and certainly qualify as violent firearms deaths.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculates that each year there are more than 11,000 gun homicides and nearly 19,000 gun suicides. That’s 30,000 firearms deaths a year in the United States. At that rate, there have already been some 2,500 violent gun deaths since Sandy Hook.
David Hemenway, a public health specialist at Harvard, says that having a gun at home increases the risk of suicide in that household by two to four times.
Thursday 17 January 2013
…a gun kept in the home was 43 times more likely to be involved in the death of a member of the household than to be used in self-defense. Art Kellermann ☀
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