in the spirit of non apropos:

just cleaned 5 years of dust out of my MBP fans . . .

both heatsinks were totally blocked up!

took about 20 minutes, 14 tiny phillips screws, not too bad. Hard part was just trusting I could get the fan connectors off and on without bending the pins.

The actual official Apple service manual doesn’t say to lift them straight up, but a good youtube video on the subject gave me that guidance.

now instead of 80 deg & 6000rpm, idle is 54 degrees @ 2000rpm!

ol MBP is good as new with 10.9.2. Maybe even better, LOL.

Re the “Tepid Recovery” of two years ago:

http://blogd.com/wp/index.php/archives/9343

turns out the job numbers have the same shape as the post dotcom recovery:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=tMa&dbeta=1

blue line is # jobs, red line is age 0.74* age 15-64, which was the ‘full employment’ of reached at the end of the Clinton admin.

Now, the previous recovery also had an expansion of 6M *new* jobs, while this one is just clawing back to where we were in 2008, 138M.

Meanwhile the ‘full employment’ level has risen from 145M to 150M, so we were 7M jobs short in 2008 and now we’re 12M!

Plus the job mix has worsened, with the middle-class jobs being replaced by retail McJobs.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=tMn&dbeta=1

Blue is retail jobs, red is manufacturing+construction+information jobs.

Zooming the first graph back to 1970:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=tMe&dbeta=1

shows how lame 2000-now has been.

Each decade — 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, *each* saw +20M jobs added, that’s 10M per 5 years on average.

The 2000s of course ended -2M in the hole, and 8M over 5 years is pretty weak when we’re still just trying to get back to where we were.

Plus we could have another recession come and set us back severely, once the Fed withdraws its QE stimulus. Since 1982 recessions have come every 8 years.

Recessions are not driven by physical processes like volcano eruptions, so there’s not really a timetable for one, but our current system is really, really f-ed still and Obama and the Dems couldn’t do much in the 2 years the electorate gave them to fix things.

Not that they had any great ideas, anyway.

I suspect if the GOP takes over they’ll do what Abe is doing, exactly, some sort of new flat tax BS that reduces the tax burden of billionaires even more, combined with colossal fiscal and monetary stimulus to cover their tracks.

Digby is very good today, with a post on comparative national happiness and “Third Way” Dems screwing up the party, and why.

Luis,
My first reaction upon hearing of Phelps death was to picket and stick it back into Westboro’s face. We could all yell at them, “So how does it feel when it’s YOUR friend/family that died?”

That kind of gloating, however, is just a knee jerk reaction. It doesn’t really change the tone of the discussion. It’s a temporary sensation of vengeance, followed by a rapid and more permanent sense of awkward shame and self-reflection.

So I agree with you now when you say no one should picket his funeral. In fact, there may be a bigger statement to make by just ignoring his passing, indicating he wasn’t really important enough for anyone to make a fuss over…

–kensensei