Recession

By the metrics of things that don’t include the staggering rate of unemployment, the recession might be over, said chief Federal Reserve dipstick Ben Bernanke. I laughed! Did you? You should have! Go on, laugh a little. You’ll feel better. Then go and try to get a…

What is possibly to say? Shit is so broken. The official jobless rate is now 9.7%, which means it is conservatively 17%. Coupled with the massive surge in stock market profit-taking income among the wealthy over the last eight months, this…

General Motors has announced it will remove the GM “Mark of Excellence” logo from its vehicles. The individual brands-Chevrolet, Cadillac, etc.-have been faring better than the corporate name in market testing. “What we’re seeing is the GM brand gets…

From the Broward-Palm Beach New Times (and via Felix Salmon) comes this tour of Florida real estate. Which is, apparently, all empty! “The pictures start at the Fort Lauderdale beach on Sunrise Blvd. and go west to federal Highway (rte 1) north to Pompano Beach about 8 miles.”

Unemployment doubled in Ireland over the last year, and maybe soon it’ll triple, so now the government is doing the obvious: distributing suicide prevention materials. (The suicide rate in Ireland, by the way, has tripled since the 1950s.) This is sad…

Laid end to end, the 31,400 metric tons of rebar used to build the Burj Dubai would stretch more than a quarter of the way around the world. “Moment. Jewel. Icon.” The Burj, it is said (by their PR department), will be known by many names. It is…