Sunday, October 14, 2012
Youth Unemployment and Idleness
The article by Jacob Funk Kirkegaard in VoxEU yesterday (13 October 2012) considers recent youth unemployment statistics using the NEET measure produced by the OECD, a measure specifically designed to report on the situation of a cohort that may be in education and training in large proportions. That measure considers labor non-participation as a share of the total cohort in an age group, in effect counting those in education and training as "active" or employed. The point is not to disguise high unemployment rates among the young--frustrated job seekers are not to be ignored--but to avoid exaggerating their percentage.
In considering the first-employment situation in France as compared to other labor markets less in purported need of "fixing" and "flexibility"--back in 2006-- I also made use of the OECD NEET statistics, and am disappointed that pundits and policy makers do not seem to appreciate their usefulness (I rarely see them cited, and believe this sighting worth pointing out).The article is alternately titled "Youth unemployment in Europe: It’s actually worse in the US" and "Youth unemployment in Europe: More complicated than it looks." The first appears in the RSS feed (an document name), the second, on the article page. Both lede with the abstract:
Youth unemployment in the Eurozone looks like a social and economic disaster in the making – 30%, 40%, even 50% of young people sitting on their hands instead of building skills and experience. This column argues the headline numbers are misleading. While youth unemployment is a serious problem, a large share of EZ youth are not in the labour force, so the headline figures overstate the labour-market ‘scar tissue’ that will be left over from the crisis.I have no particular criticisms of Kierkegaard's clear article, which contains only a couple of charts and no subtle equations, an article accessible to non-economists, to all (literate) voters. I highlight (my emphasis) three points he makes in conclusion:
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It is indeed noteworthy that the US NEET ratio is in Q1 2011 higher than
- in the EZ aggregate,
- the 27 members of the EU aggregate, and
- the UK ratio.
- With an increase of 2.7 percentage points over the crisis, the US rate has increased more than these countries.
- In the aggregate, therefore, American youth is today idler and worse affected by the crisis than their EZ and UK counterparts.
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Monday, October 08, 2012
escape Confusion
About the title: this is not advice on what to do when one is confused, it is an attempt (a short essay) to dispel the confusion about the escape key and escape codes that yesterday's piece in the New York Times (Who Made The Escape Key) may have created.
The key source of confusion is well expressed by a reader on the comments:
isaac32767, Portland, OR, wrote:
Bob Bemer invented the Escape *code* (or character), not the key. He contributed a number of special codes to ASCII, a standard way to encode common characters. Ironically, Bemer worked for IBM, the very last major computer company to adopt ASCII. On communications terminals (which were originally designed to talk to other terminals, not computers), the escape character means “the following sequence does not have its normal meaning.” It's used for things like changing the color of text. You could (still can) enter this character by typing Control-[, but an escape character was needed often enough to rate its own key on most terminals. Today's computer keyboards owe their design to these terminals.The author of the New York Times piece, and the "expert" consulted, seem not to realize that the key originated at IBM because IBM was still using EBCDIC rather than ASCII to encode (associate numbers with) letters and other symbols. The keyboards for the IBM machines could not produce many ASCII character codes necessary to communicate with ASCII equipment. The "trick" was to reserve a character that would, as Isaac32767 says, mean "use the following numbers to produce an ASCII code" (as IBM describes in their manual for z/OS ). When the keyboard was used on ASCII computers, such as PCs, that function was no longer needed. I guess nobody ever needed to key in EBCDIC codes while working on ASCII machines, but do not know why not. In any case, the escape key was adopted as what I'd call a "soft break", used to get running programs to cancel an operation in progress without terminating the program.
One of the shortcomings of the article is that it omits mention other keys that all said "Stop what you’re doing. I need to take control." (the purported role of escape) to various degrees: break, pause and SysRq, and special key combinations like crtl-c (or ctrl-d, depending on the operating system) and ctrl-alt-del. As explained in various Wikipedia articles, SysRq (or System) got the attention of the machine at a very fundamental level, allowing one to actually switch the operating system one was using. It is not clear whether this is the same as calling for a boot loader and rebooting, or if there was some way to load more than one OS and switch back and forth. Break has its origins in the way telegraph keys function. ctrl-break and ctrl-c are now commonly used to stop a program that is running (particularly if one fears it will never terminate if left running). escape often has a similar function within an application, killing an operation or macro but not terminating the application.
As should be familiar to people needing to use characters from, say, foreign alphabets not assigned to keys on their keyboard (a challenge when traveling, for instance), the way to enter such *codes* on ASCII keyboards no longer relies on escape but now uses alt. For example, the way to enter escape is "alt+0 alt+2 alt+7 (holding alt down for the three strokes works at least as well). (in emacs, this would be M-027).
To summarize, escape was not another attention button, it was a special symbol meaning "consider the keyboard type to have changed for the following sequence of keystrokes." IBM put a key for it on their EBCDIC keyboards and left it on the PC keyboard when they introduced the PC; application programmers adopted it as soft break in the ASCII environment.
Note: Lotus 1-2-3 and Lotus Symphony had a way of entering escape sequences putting the ASCII code between braces. Escape, which one might need to invoke in a macro but could not key in directly, was {027}.
Wednesday, October 03, 2012
No More Riding in My Car Car
My car was struck by another car a few weeks ago. Both cars had been parked (idle--sleeping-- on the roadside) when a third car strayed their way and collided with the other car which then was projected against mine.
One might think that the fender-bending which resulted, at least for the least-damaged car (mine), could and would be repaired. The damage was to the cowl, bumper, slight bowing of the hood, dislocation of the headlights on one side. There are people who know how to repair such damage, and there are plenty of people out of work who could help and learn by doing if the body-shop craftspeople are too busy.
The insurance company experts figured that one (I) could replace the vehicle for less than one (the insurance company) would have to pay for the body work. I believe they were wrong. There aren't equivalent cars readily available in the vicinity for the price they quote. There are, and should be, craftspeople capable of straightening the front of a mechanically fine car. The economic, and efficient, choice was to destroy the car rather than to employ people to straighten its cowl and bumper.
I drove the car for my last time, this morning, to the place the wrecker's truck was waiting. The agent looked at it and asked, "they totalled it for that?" I explained, then he got in, started it instantly, and drove it up onto his carrier, no time wasted dragging it on as one would with a really broken car. What a waste.
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