11/5/14 -11/11/14 Arts and Urbanism Roundup

Pittsburgh

Conflict Kitchen's Palestinian programming under siege (Hyperallergic)

The BBC's mobile news bureau experiment stops in Pittsburgh (Essential Pittsburgh)

Blame this Pittsburgh official for daylight savings time (Government Executive)

Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra plays it by ear when hiring musicians (Pittsburgh Post Gazette)

Cleveland

Cleveland voters pass law that eliminates all city traffic cameras (USA Today)

Cleveland suburb, Maple Heights, Ohio also votes to remove traffic cameras (Cleveland.com)

Study projects Cleveland's downtown may have 23,000 residents in 5 years (ABC 5)

Walkable townhome development planned in Lakewood, Ohio (Cleveland.com)

Cuyahoga County expected to borrow $168 million to repair and spruce up government buildings (Cleveland Scene)

West Virginia and Appalachia

18 year old freshman elected to house of delegates becomes youngest state lawmaker in U.S.
(CBS DC)

As coal jobs vanish, miners search or new careers (Associated Press)

Other Urbanism and Architecture news

NYC's hugely expensive Fulton Center transit hub opens to riders (NY1)

Americans aren't as car dependent as you might think (Streetsblog USA)

New Urbanism Film Festival kicks of in Los Angeles (Streetsblog LA)

Feeding the homeless: Act of charity or a crime? (My Fox Houston)

Airbnb finally adds a "don't secretly film guests" policy (BetaBeat)

How wearable tech will transform walkability of our cities (Tech Cocktail)

Does Pheonix have a soul?  (AZ Central)

An Etsy co-founder and his wife have big plans for Albuquerque (CityLab)

Is America's civic-architecture inherently racist?  (Intercultural Urbanism)

In symbolic vote, 80% of Catalans support independence from Spain (Yahoo News)

Why some places still have plenty of pay phones (CityLab)

The rise of invisible unemployment (CityLab)

Germany celebrates 25th anniversary of fall of the Berlin Wall  (Wall Street Journal)

Other arts and archeology news 

A treasure hunt for undiscovered American artists (CBS Sunday Morning)

Brooklyn art center uses Airbnb to fund its programming (Hyperallergic)

Former director of NY's Frick Museum speaks out against expansion plan (Artnet)

Sotheby's Q3 revenue drops 12.7 percent (ArtNews)

Qatari sheikh, once one of the world's top art collectors dies suddenly 
(The Art Newspaper)

Norwegian architects fight to save historic National Gallery (The Art Newspaper)

U.K. copyright laws prevent display of hundred year old soldier's letters and other historic documents  (Reason)

Islamists blow up church dedicated to victims of the Armenian genocide (Public Radio of Armenia)

Meet Baxter, the Trainable Manufacturing Robot Today @ CMU: He Works Cheap

Great news is that rising manufacturing wages in China and cheap natural gas energy are helping push more plants back to the states. The bad news that manufacturing employment is not going up, partly due to robots like Baxter. He doesn't need health insurance.

From the time the first "Ludite" smashed a loom competing for his job, workers have feared job losses from automation.




Check out Baxter today @ CMU

When: Wednesday, July 31. Media preview is at 11 a.m.; laboratory open house is from noon to 2 p.m.

Where: The Veloso Lab is in room 3201 of the Gates and Hillman centers on the Carnegie Mellon campus. From the Gates and Hillman elevators, make a U-turn to the left and follow the hallway to its end. Parking is available in the Gates Center parking garage. Because of construction, the Gates garage can no longer be accessed via Roberts Drive. Access now is via South Neville Street; call Byron Spice, 412-268-9068 for detailed directions.

Are You Unemployed?

Should be a simple question-- but the government has a way of making nothing simple.

Lies And Other Government Statistics

I'd like to get the blog back to more locally oriented posts but I feel compelled once again to try to point out what should be obvious facts and areas of discussion not covered or often even mentioned by the major media or what I call the Zombie Media.



"How can you spot Zombie Financial Media?
No Memory
Contradictions between reports are not recalled or noted.
Previous reports are forgotten shortly after release.
No comprehension:
No two events are related to a shared root cause"

Remember those words every time you hear a widely reported economic figure. Kick the tires, look under the hood, even if you are bad at math, and dazed by numbers like I often am, you will probably be better at it than the government and mainstream media.

Another tip is to write these figures down--- and compare them to later and earlier numbers. Above all-- watch for "revisions".

Initial numbers are always fuzzy estimates and are later revised as harder figures come, like tax and Social Security receipts.

Funny thing is that initial numbers are always page one and revisions on page 28.

"No Memory"

For example here are the headline unemployment figures some months last year and early this year next to the later revised figures.

August 2008: Initially 84,000, revised to 175,000

September 2008: Initially 159,000, revised to 321,000

October 2008: Initially 240,000, revised to 380,000

November 2008: Initially 533,000, revised to 597,000

December 2008: Initially 524,000, revised to 681,000

January 2009: Initially 598,000, revised to 655,000

If you were watching or listening to the news at work or on the drive home, you likely were cheered to hear that the BLS, the main federal agency keeping economic stats says the unemployment rate is down to --- only 10%. The dollar and stocks rose, gold fell and the president called it "encouraging".

But in the same report-- they say 11,000 jobs were estimated to have been lost. This is a small clue! So if 11,000 jobs were lost then the unemployment rate went up right-- unless perhaps the population fell? Well, actually they assume it went up by a small amount so one really has to look under the hood.

But before we start lets get to the mother of all revisions in a little bomb dropped by the BLS in October-- and of course not widely reported.

"The Labor Department said that it planned to revise the job figures by subtracting more than 800,000 jobs that it had wrongly estimated were filled by workers.

The planned revision indicates that this has been by far the worst recession since World War II, causing a 5.8 percent reduction in the number of jobs in this country since employment peaked at the end of 2007.

The decline in private sector employment was even greater, at 7 percent.

The so-called “benchmark revision” that was announced today will not formally be incorporated into the job figures until February, and could be revised. But the figures indicate that last March the government overestimated the total number of jobs by 824,000, or 0.6 percent. Its overestimate of private-sector employment was even greater — 855,000 jobs, or 0.8 percent."

Yes, that's right, these changed figures hack off more jobs than most economists think the so called "stimulus" created. One has to ask why, the government is admitting their numbers are very off while only promising to fully adjust them in February.

Why wait and allow numbers they know are wrong to be widely reported by our Zombie Press?

"Contradictions between reports are not recalled or noted."

"Previous reports are forgotten shortly after release".



Click to enlarge

Even more disturbingly, the BLS or B.S. for short is still putting out data using the same flawed thinking as before.

The key here is the last line on the table labeled, Total Nonfarm Birth/Death Adjustment. Really, this is a number number pulled out of thin air, in an attempt to guess how many businesses are being born and dying in a given period and the number of jobs created by them.

The underlying problem is not hard to figure out, people extrapolate from trends. In normal or "boom" times, the net number of jobs created by new businesses is greater than the number lost by closing ones. But, hello--- every statistic and figure available shows we are in a very serious recession that has hit small businesses particularly hard. It doesn't take a genius to guess that the birth death adjustment should be assuming net job losses among small businesses.

But it's a mighty convenient mistake isn't it?

Now getting to the other big factor in today's reported number. As stated, Even after the 30 thousand jobs the BLS imagines small businesses created, one still has a loss of 11,000 jobs.

But, here the BS people have a different spin. See, according to them only people who actively looked for a job in the last month are counted as part of the "labor force". After all the long term unemployed are conveniently removed, they can report this hopeful and encouraging decline in the unemployment rate.

As a reality check a survey of small business owners released today provides a grim contrast.

The mood of small business owners generally has soured in November for three straight years, as economic confidence dropped from October to November in 2007 and 2008. The November 2008 index of 67.5 is the low point for the Watch since it started in August 2006.

52 percent of owners say they have experienced cash flow issues in the past 90 days, up from 44 percent in October. Forty-one percent of owners say they have not experienced cash flow issues, which is the lowest response in this category since the Watch began. The remaining 6 percent said they weren't sure.

53 percent of small business owners see conditions getting worse in the next six months, up from 43 percent in October; while 19 percent report that conditions are improving, a sharp decline from 29 percent in October; 23 percent see conditions as the same, and 5 percent weren't sure.

62 percent of small business owners rate the economy as poor, an increase from 55 percent in October; 30 percent rate it as fair, and 8 percent say it is good or excellent.

53 percent of small business owners think the overall economy is getting worse, up from 44 percent in October but still significantly lower than the 69 percent of owners who felt that way in February 2009, the last time the Watch index was this low. For November; 28 percent say the economy is getting better, down from 35 percent in October; 16 percent see it staying the same, and 3 percent are not sure.

Holy Crap: Art Prize Draws Thousands To Grand Rapids

Ok, I didn't know anything at all about this, but I'll go out on a limb and say this is a potential game changer for the entire history of the state of Michigan and perhaps the entire "Rust Belt".

To set the stage here, the statistics and evidence show Michigan to be in at the very least a full blown depression bringing to mind words like disaster area and catastrophe.

"Michigan's seasonally adjusted unemployment inched up a tenth of a percentage point in September to 15.3 percent, state officials said Wednesday.

The figure compares with a 9.8 percent U.S. unemployment rate for the same month. The U.S. Bureau of Labor is scheduled to update the unemployment rates for all 50 states later this month, but Michigan has had the nation's highest unemployment rate since early 2006."

Grim, awfull; but it don't tell the half of it.

Following the link in the story, brings us this headine- "Discouragement over bleak job market shrank Michigan's labor force by 79,000 during last year."

Yes by the government's sick and obviously dishonest logic, people who are too discouraged to look for work, are not considered unemployed. However, it doesn't stop there a whole range of other people aren't counted in that figure either.



Above is a chart of the nationwide U6 unemployment rate.

The U6 rate includes

U1: Percentage of labor force unemployed 15 weeks or longer.

U2: Percentage of labor force who lost jobs or completed temporary work.

U3: Official unemployment rate per ILO definition.

U4: U3 + "discouraged workers", or those who have stopped looking for work because current economic conditions make them believe that no work is available for them.

U5: U4 + other "marginally attached workers", or "loosely attached workers", or those who "would like" and are able to work, but have not looked for work recently.

U6: U5 + Part time workers who want to work full time, but cannot due to economic reasons.

But, Peter Schiff and others have pointed out that this figure also doesn't count a lot of people. If you own a "business or are self employed or an "independent contractor". You are not counted as unemployed. However, if your business is not doing well, you may have little or no income. Likewise, the retired are also seeing a huge decline in their savings.

Sorry, but it get's a lot worse. U6 unemployment/underemployment in Michigan, Oregon, California and Rhode Island is over 20%. Even by these criteria, Michigan is in a class by itself since it's had huge unemployment for many,many years.The main reason things aren't worse is that almost anyone with other options leaves the state.

"About 109,000 more people left Michigan last year than moved in. It is one of the worst rates in the nation, quadruple the loss of just eight years ago. The state loses a family every 12 minutes, and the families who are leaving -- young, well-educated high-income earners -- are the people the state desperately needs to rebuild.

Long treated as a symptom of Michigan's economic woes, outmigration has exploded into a massive problem of its own, a slow-motion Katrina splintering families, gutting state coffers and crippling an already hobbled economy, one moving van at a time."

I'll try to stop there but if you google.

Michigan Bankruptcy Rate
Michigan Foreclosure Rate
Michigan Homeless Stats

Or a long list of other measures, you will see a lot of bad stuff. Don't click images without some morphine on hand.

With all this in mind and in light of the years and billions spent efforts by the state, local and federal government to "fix things"; one wouldn't have guessed $500,000 dollars put up by a private individual as award money in an "American Idol style" art contest would have had much impact.

"Unprepared for the surge in ArtPrize visitors, some restaurants ran out of food and were forced to close early. Others stuck to their policy of being closed Sundays.

"Nobody had any clue this would happen," Doug Small, president of the Grand Rapids/Kent County Convention & Visitors Bureau, said Wednesday.

Few hotels tracked ArtPrize traffic, Small said. Because the summer travel season was over and no other major events were taking place in the area, he said it's likely many extra hotel guests were there because of ArtPrize."

I will try to follow up on this.