Cause for doom #1: People talk on their mobile phones while driving which causes almost a quarter of all car accidents.
Cause for doom #2: the primary solution politicians seem to favor - bans on mobile phone use while driving - appears to be more politically effective than anything.
What just happened to the soldier suicide rate?
Data from 1,000 US Soldier Suicides
Chart-o-doom time
via DailyKos
This looks substantially less Doomy than the last time we had this exchange. The first derivative was still quite negative. Things are leveling off right now. But perhaps there’s more Doom in the future… We wonder what will happen as state budgets start to implode. Will that result in another downturn? Will it simply lessen the probability of a V-shaped recovery?
Big corporations got a little smaller in 2009.
In 2009, the total number of mass layoff events, at 28,030, reached its highest annual level since 1996, the first year for which these data are available.
The total number of initial claims for unemployment insurance benefits due to mass layoffs, at 2,796,456, was also the highest level on record.
Big Brothers (via Michæl Paukner)
“As highlighted by The Economist, only 400,000 more Americans were employed in 2009 vs. 1999 despite the fact that the population had grown by 30 million. Yet it gets worse — Not only has unemployment skyrocketed, but long-term unemployment has skyrocketed even higher.
The Economist: Long-term unemployment is what will make this economic downturn inordinately tough for many Americans to bear. Regardless of what headline U.S. GDP data may do, many of the people represented by the spike below will experience a multi-year personal economic downturn regardless.
Of course, it’s worth asking whether the skills they forget will even be valuable by the time things turn around.”
CHART OF THE DAY: Workers Are Unemployed So Long, They’re Forgetting Their Skills
“Think the U.S. is in a slump? Check out the World GDP numbers for 2009. The U.S. percentage of output has remained remarkably stable, even with recent economic troubles, even with spikes in contributions by so-called “Asian tigers” (rrrarr!) — India, China, and the like. But on a per-person, level how does the output of workers in other countries stack up against the output of U.S. laborers? FastCompany.com adjusted for population and crunched the data.”
Best Bodies, Global GDP Edition | The Upswing | Fast Company
Hidden doom: the U.S. is making the best (for now) of a bad situation.
The World’s Most Profitable Companies
Chart O’ Doom: Where Your Money Goes Edition!
continuum:socialsciencevisualized:
The US Credit Card Crisis. Dec 9 2009. By Derri Hassmi flickr.com
