I see an economic diasater coming...

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A new stirling car.Im not so crazy afterall!  http://www.stirling-king.com/?gclid=CKTg7eqC76wCFQYBQAodNBzHIQ  only a model but the idea exists!triffid

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More bad news about jobs!Here's a quick, fascinating followup to last week's monthly unemployment numbers...[/size][/size]
As we reported, one big reason that the national jobless rate dropped in November to 8.6 percent, from 9 percent was that the labor force shrank by 315,000 people, as discouraged workers stopped looking.[/size]
But the New York Times notes that what's even more surprising is that the number of men in the workforce actually rose last month, by about 23,000. Meanwhile, the number of women fell by 339,000 (because of rounding, the numbers don't add up to 315,000).[/size]
What explains the gender gap? It's worth noting that 58 percent of the women who left the labor force were employed in October - so for them, it wasn't a case of growing discouraged after months of fruitless searching for work. Catherine Rampell of the Times writes: "I would guess that most of them, though, were laid-off workers who had not yet started looking for a new job. After all, state and local governments are shedding workers in large numbers, and most state and local workers are women."[/size]
Sounds plausible. And of course, many of those laid-off government workers, especially in big states like California and New York, are teachers, who are even more likely to be women. So that probably plays into it as well.[/size]

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A third of the jobless in Iowa have been looking for work for over six months.http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/jobless-iowa-third-state-unemployed-looking-six-months-130045235.html  triffid

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But for many people in Iowa, the most important day-to-day concern is the state's struggle, along with the rest of the country, to throw off the effects of the Great Recession and the halting recovery that's followed.[/size]
Although low by national standards, Iowa's official unemployment rate has spiked to 6 percent--around 99,000 people--from 3.7 percent in 2007, before the economic downturn began. And jobless spells are lasting longer than ever. Iowa's long-term unemployment rate--the share of the 99,000 unemployed who have been out of work for 6 months or more--is 34 percent, nearly twice what it was before the downturn began.[/size]
"We look better, it sounds better, it feels better," said David Swenson, an economist who teaches at Iowa State University. "But in fact we have a lot of the stresses and the consequences of the recession that the rest of the nation has."[/size]

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Compounding the problem, the recession exacerbated a nationwide trend that was already underway: a shift toward jobs with lower pay and fewer hours. The jobs gained in Iowa since the recession officially ended in 2009 pay more than $5,000 less, on average, than those lost during the downturn, according to a recent report by the Iowa Policy Project, a union-backed group. Iowa is one of only three states in which wages for low-, median-, and high-wage workers were all lower last year, after adjusting for inflation, than they were a decade earlier. Colette Noble said she'd be "thrilled" to get a job that paid 60 or 70 percent of what she was making before.[/size]
Workers of all ages have been hit hard, but Iowans between the ages of 25 and 54 saw a greater rise in unemployment than their younger and older cohorts, the report found. "People that are in their 40s and 50s are not finding work," Swenson said.[/size]