Th3 Core

This is interesting, seems the consumer is a lagging indicator.

Consumers and corporate chieftains are heading in the opposite direction, with one group still brimming with good thoughts about the future and the other sure that tougher times are coming.

Recent surveys exemplify a trend that began a few years ago and has accelerated over the past several months. The gap between sentiment is broad and growing, though there’s some reason to believe that a change could be coming.

Chief executive officers and chief financial officers see an economy that is heading into a slowdown if not an outright recession. Recent surveys show that CEOs believe recession is the biggest risk in 2020, while almost all CFOs surveyed by Deloitte think the economy is likely to at least slow.

They view the U.S.-China trade war, a slowing global picture and increasing headline political risks as threats to the decadelong expansion that is the longest in American history.

But consumers are in the opposite camp.

While sentiment has leveled off from record highs, they still view conditions as generally positive. Spending remains strong even amid a growing savings rate, as consumers remain the beneficiary of a 50-year low in the unemployment rate and historic highs for the stock market.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/09/ceo-confidence-in-economy-has-cratered-consumers-say-things-are-ok.html

I use to know a Philippine national who became very rich shipping old heavy equipment from North America into Asia.  I suppose today he could reverse the flow (at least for farm tractors) and make more money.

Yes, seems pretty good.  I'll be sure to use it to look for obscure topics and hard to find videos.

I hope he chimes in, but I am going to guess.   When the economy tanks people still need a place to live but stores/businesses close down and the property owner is stuck paying the mortgage/insurance/taxes on an empty building.

During the last recessions when there were tons of empty buildings rents were actually going up in some parts as people lost their homes and put upwards pressure on rentals.

The manufacturing recession underway shows up in the employment numbers: The nation’s factories shed 12,000 jobs in December, with the steepest loss in the making of fabricated metal products. A further 8,000 jobs were lost in the mining sector, reflecting a slump in spending on energy exploration. Transportation and warehousing employment fell by 10,400, another potential knock-on effect of the manufacturing slump.

This story is not too complicated: The sectors that bear the brunt of the global economic slowdown and the trade wars are cutting jobs, or at least they were in December.

Lots of low level service job growth, but I'd like to see a map of where those jobs are.  I have a suspicion that the places hit the most from the decline in skilled labor jobs aren't opening too many Starbucks.

I worry that humanity isn't smart enough to properly govern DNA technologies.  You guys remember the murderer who was caught by triangulating the DNA from his relatives in a public database?  In that case it was for the public good, but what happens when the institutions are corrupted?

I was curious about the total numbers of active blogs today vs. say 12 years ago and came across this.

https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/how-many-blogs/

OK, so programming may be a stretch, but how about solar panel installation or wind turbine maintenance?

According to new data, by 2016 it was generating more than US$1.3 trillion in annual revenue and employed approximately 9.5m people – making it the largest green market in the world. It’s been growing rapidly too – between 2013 and 2016, both the industry’s value and employment figures grew by 20%.

...

Our analysis also suggests that in the US, nearly ten times more people were employed in the green economy and its supply chains (9.5m) than employed directly in the fossil fuel industry (roughly 1m) – that is, miners, electricity grid workers, infrastructure manufacturers and construction workers. This wide gap comes despite the US fossil fuel industry receiving huge subsidies, estimated at $649 billion in 2015 alone.

https://ponderwall.com/index.php/2019/11/02/green-economy-growth-trump-fossil/