Jobless Rate Probably Climbed in October Amid Lax Hiring; Frankenstorm Sandy Updates

Updates

November 10, 2012: a bit of trivia comes to light regarding Long Power Light Authority following Frankenstorm Sandy. The dots are starting to connect.


November 9, 2012: liquor drought; authorities want US military to come in to restore power.

November 9, 2012: still out of juice. 

November 8, 2012: after Sandy, no one lined up for wind turbines.


November 6, 2012: a nor-easter to follow Sandy.

November 6, 2012: Hurricane Sandy and the failures of blue-statism. 

November 2, 2012: Hurricane Sandy headlines at Drudge.

November 2, 2012: despite Sandy, CLNE was able to get 49 natural gas stations up and running.

November 1, 2012: instant Karma.


Later, 6:29 pm: MDW dots connecting. The other day the global warming story about an early snowfall walloping northern California and now a photo of a global warming winter snowstorm in Montana affecting Frankenstorm Sandy. At the link:

Officials are bracing for the worst: nearly a foot of rain, high winds and up to 2 feet of snow in the highest parts of the Appalachian Mountains from West Virginia to North Carolina.

Later, 6:16 pm: The original post was about the jobless rate, but I included a note to the granddaughters regarding Frankenstorm Sandy. Now more news is coming in regarding the storm. This is particularly interesting: schools in Belmont (west of Boston), where our granddaughters attend school, have just announced cancellation of school for tomorrow. Wow.  And then this: the extratropical cyclone could wreak havoc on the refineries in the northeast.

By 6 pm ET Sunday both the Delaware Bay and New York Harbor will be closed to tanker and barge traffic. This means that the refineries will no longer be able to receive crude oil or load out product.

Product outages can occur not only in the New York and Philadelphia metro areas but extend to Bridgeport, New Haven, Providence and Boston.

As this is written, all five refineries are operating. I expect that they will have to reduce crude processing rates by 40 percent in order to make it through until crude oil resupply resumes.

Original Post

That was the Bloomberg headline: jobless rate probably climbed in October amid lax hiring.

I'm trying to think of the other reasons that would cause the jobless rate to go up.

I can't make this stuff up.

The jobless rate climbing is hardly due to firings and layoffs (though that is part of the story) but the huge firings and layoffs over the past three or four years have cut employee rolls pretty much to the bone, I would think; there's not a lot of fat left in any industry for additional firings and layoffs, I don't suppose. I guess we might see some large disruptions yet in the banking business: Bank of America will cut 16,000 jobs by December. UBS will cut 10,000 jobs.

A Note To the Granddaughters

[Faux environmentalists / global warming fanatics said that Hurricane Sandy was an example of global warming. They did not mention that Hurricane Sandy was barely a Category 1 when it hit New England. No one mentioned the Great Hurricane of 1938 that was a Category 5 over the ocean and was a Category 3 hurricane when it hit New England landfall.]

The East Coast is awaiting the arrival of Tropical Storm Sandy. Or Hurricane Sandy. Or "Frankenstorm Sandy." Or Extratropical Cyclone Sandy.

After moving ashore, Sandy is expected to become an extratropical cyclone rather than a hurricane — but people in its path may not notice the difference. The National Hurricane Center said “it is important to note that this transition will not diminish the overall impacts of this dangerous weather system.”  -- New York Times

The difference between a cyclone and a hurricane is a) the number of syllables; and, b) one starts with a "soft" "c" and one starts with a "hard" "h." But other than that, those in the middle of one or the other would be hard pressed to tell the difference. 

Whatever. The Boston-Framingham radio station WROR is predicting winds of over 500 mph which will they say will result in some broken tree limbs and 18 feet of rain which will cause some local flooding in low-lying areas. And then something about a huge octopus....

So, I drove Miss Daisey up to the north shore (Gloucester-Ipswich-Plum Island) to see first-hand the enormity of the storm at noon, Sunday, about the time the storm was hitting the coast much farther south. It was (and still is) overcast, quite windy, with intermittent rain, but mostly heavy mist. The ocean (as seen from the shore) is full of white-caps, probably four-foot swells. And already causing significant beach erosion. Foreshadowing rising ocean levels due to global warming this next century.

We stopped in at one of favorite destinations, Mass Audubon's Joppa Flats Education Center, just outside Newburyport. No birds today; they are all hunkered down somewhere. We did see one fishing boat, a small trawler of some sorts, high-tailing it into safe harbors. (There's probably a better nautical word for "high-tailing" but I grew up in North Dakota where I didn't see many trawlers.) Speaking of which, our older granddaughter, age 9, wants to be a marine biologist when she grows up and live either in Arizona or North Dakota, where she says the houses are ten miles apart and people have large backyards. A long commute, no doubt, from her house to work.