Klarm Machining Blog

A few nice stamping parts china images I found:

China postage stamp: green pig

Image by karen horton
c. 1960, part of Pig Breeding set

American Mailboxes – Hope Street … Tired Of Inequality? (September 12, 2013 3:05 AM) — Read an excerpt of Average Is Over …

Image by marsmet473a
It’s a radical change from the America of 40 or 50 years ago. Cowen believes the wealthy will become more numerous, and even more powerful. The elderly will hold on to their benefits … the young, not so much. Millions of people who might have expected a middle class existence may have to aspire to something else.
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Help / The Help Forum

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Hello Staff,

Can you please take me out of the Beta experience! The option to Opt Out has disappeared and I’m stuck in this Phone App lookalike design.

Please take me out!!

Regards
Posted at 7:31AM, 29 November 2013 PST
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— Canadax…whY!? says:

You might want to see the staff answer on this page.
Posted 3 days ago.
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— Immaculate Dream says:

Canadax…whY!?:

Thanks,
I’ve seen that posting before though. Just wondered if there still would be a possible way out of it, by the help of the staff manually. The Beta feel just like a Phone App and I’m really tired of it. The old design were much more personal.
Posted 2 days ago.
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— Immaculate Dream says:

Been a member since 2008. I don’t have a ton of pictures uploaded. Decided to become a PRO member just because I wanted to support Flickr.com financially and keep the site up and running.

Due to the latest negative changes to the design +plus the forced Beta Experience which I can not get rid of, I don’t feel that Flickr.com is supporting me as a user in return. I therefore have now decided to not renew my PRO membership next year.

You did it to yourself…
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… marsmet524 photo … American Mailboxes — “Suicide of a Superpower” by Pat Buchanan (October 14, 2011) …item 2.. Food stamp purchases at military commissaries have nearly tripled during the last four years (Novermber 15, 2011) …

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…..item 1)…. Tired Of Inequality? One Economist Says It’ll Only Get Worse …

… NPR … www.npr.org/2013/ … arts & life > books > author interviews

by NPR STAFF
September 12, 2013 3:05 AM

www.npr.org/2013/09/12/221425582/tired-of-inequality-one-...

Economist Tyler Cowen has some advice for what to do about America’s income inequality: Get used to it. In his latest book, Average Is Over, Cowen lays out his prediction for where the U.S. economy is heading, like it or not:

"I think we’ll see a thinning out of the middle class," he tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep. "We’ll see a lot of individuals rising up to much greater wealth. And we’ll also see more individuals clustering in a kind of lower-middle class existence."
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img code photo … Economist Tyler Cowen

media.npr.org/assets/img/2013/09/11/istock_000006025149xs…

Economist Tyler Cowen believes that income inequality in America is only increasing. His new book is called Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation.

Szasz-Fabian Ilka Erika / iStockphoto.com

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It’s a radical change from the America of 40 or 50 years ago. Cowen believes the wealthy will become more numerous, and even more powerful. The elderly will hold on to their benefits … the young, not so much. Millions of people who might have expected a middle class existence may have to aspire to something else.

"Imagine a very large bohemian class of the sort that say, lives in parts of Brooklyn," Cowen explains. "… It will be culturally upper or upper-middle class, but there will be the income of lower-middle class. They may have lives that are quite happy and rewarding, but they may not have a lot of savings. There will be a certain fragility to this existence."
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img code photo …. Average Is over

media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/a/average-is-over…

Average Is Over
Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
by Tyler Cowen

Hardcover, 290 pages purchase
digital culture
nonfiction
science & health
business & economy

More on this book:

… NPR reviews, interviews and more
… Read an excerpt

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Some people, he predicts, may just have to find a new definition of happiness that costs less money. Cowen says this widening is the result of a shifting economy. Computers will play a larger role and people who can work with computers can make a lot. He also predicts that everyone will be ruthlessly graded — every slice of their lives, monitored, tracked and recorded.

— Interview Highlights

… On how we’ll all be rated, all the time

"Everything is rated. Everything will have a Yelp review. And if you’re a worker, there’ll be, like, credit scores. There already are, to some extent. How reliable are you? How many jobs have you had? Have there been lawsuits filed against you? How many traffic tickets? And I think we’re also moving to a world where we measure much more precisely. But we as individuals will quite often find this oppressive."
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… On how it will be ‘easier’ for talented people to become rich

"I think what will happen is, because we measure better and more over time, people who are truly talented will become millionaires much more easily. So I think we’ll move from a country where instead of talking about the one percent, it will be the 15 percent, for instance. But there will be fewer second chances in this world, and that’s what I think will be quite difficult."
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… On how it will be harder to recover from early failures

"I think what happens is when there’s more and better measurement, it’s like credit scores. Once you get a bad credit score, yes, it is possible to fix it, but as you probably know, it’s pretty difficult. So I think it will reward people who are disciplined early in their lives, and that will help a lot of people, but it also will harm some others."
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… On what all this means for upward mobility

"I think for a lot of people, upward mobility will be much easier. We’re seeing an enormous amount of global upward mobility that’s quite rapid and quite sudden, and undiscovered individuals have a chance — using the Internet, using computers — to prove themselves very quickly. So I think the mobility story will be a quite complicated one. We’ll have a kind of new meritocracy, but again, it will be a meritocracy, which will be oppressive and perceived as oppressive in some ways due to more rapid measurement and this requirement that the person in some way really prove himself or herself."
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… On returning to an era of inequality
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img code photo … Tyler Cowen

media.npr.org/assets/img/2013/09/11/tylercowen_custom-8e4…

Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He is also the author of The Great Stagnation, An Economist Gets Lunch, Good and Plenty and Create Your Own Economy. He blogs at Marginal Revolution.Enlarge image

Stephen Gosling / Courtesy Dutton Adult

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"It will be a very strange world, I think. We will be returning to historical levels of inequality. We’ll view post-war America as a kind of strange interlude not to be repeated. It won’t be the dreams that we all had that virtually all incomes go up in lockstep at three percent a year. It hurts to give that up. It will mean some very real increases in economic fragility for a lot of people."
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… On how this economy may encourage creativity

"I think it will be fantastically creative. I think a lot of people will be liberated from a lot of oppressive manufacturing jobs, or a lot of service jobs, because they’ll be done by computers. There’ll be the world’s best education available online and free. I think there’s a lot about this future that will be enormously, fantastically exciting."
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… On whether we’re giving up on helping the nation’s poorest people improve their status

"I absolutely do not want to give up. But if you ask the question ‘Is the rise in inequality inevitable?’ it probably is. The question is: What’s the way to deal with that so that even when income inequality is going up, maybe happiness inequality isn’t going up in the same way."
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… On the old adage that the poor are happier than the rich

"I don’t think that’s true. But I think people who are not rich can be extremely happy. And I think the chances to be happy in this new world, with many more opportunities to be creative, to be online, to educate yourself — there’ll be a lot more chances to be happy. It’s not to say everyone will take them or be equipped to take them, but there will be a lot of new paths to opportunity."
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— Read an excerpt of Average Is Over

www.npr.org/books/titles/221423095/average-is-over-poweri...

Excerpt: Average Is Over
Work and Wages in iWorld

This book is far from all good news. Being young and having no job remains stubbornly common. Wages for young people fortunate enough to get a job have gone down. Inflation-adjusted wages for young high school graduates were 11 percent higher in 2000 than they were more than a decade later, and inflation-adjusted wages of young college graduates (four years only) have fallen by more than 5 percent. Unemployment rates for young college graduates have been running for years now in the neighborhood of 10 percent and underemployment rates near 20 percent. The sorry truth is that a lot of young people are facing diminished job opportunities, even several years after the formal end of the recession in 2009, when the economy began to once again expand after a historic contraction.

Many people are seeing the erosion of their economic futures. The labor market troubles of the young—which you can observe in many countries—are a harbinger of the new world of work to come. Lacking the right training means being shut out of opportunities like never before.

At the same time, the very top earners, who often have advanced postsecondary degrees, are earning much more. Average is over is the catchphrase of our age, and it is likely to apply all the more to our future.

This maxim will apply to the quality of your job, to your earnings, to where you live, to your education and to the education of your children, and maybe even to your most intimate relationships. Marriages, families, businesses, countries, cities, and regions all will see a greater split in material outcomes; namely, they will either rise to the top in terms of quality or make do with unimpressive results.

These trends stem from some fairly basic and hard‑to‑reverse forces: the increasing productivity of intelligent machines, economic globalization, and the split of modern economies into both very stagnant sectors and some very dynamic sectors. Consider the iPhone. The iPhone is made on a global scale, and it blends computers, the internet, communications, and artificial intelligence in one blockbuster, game-changing innovation. It reflects so many of the things that our contemporary world is good at, indeed great at. Today’s iPhone would have been the most powerful computer in the world as recently as 1985. Yet to cite two contrasting sectors, typical air travel doesn’t go faster than it did in 1970, and it is not clear our K–12 educational system has much improved.

This imbalance in technological growth will have some surprising implications. For instance, workers more and more will come to be classified into two categories. The key questions will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you? Worst of all, are you competing against the computer? Are computers helping people in China and India compete against you?

If you and your skills are a complement to the computer, your wage and labor market prospects are likely to be cheery. If your skills do not complement the computer, you may want to address that mismatch. Ever more people are starting to fall on one side of the divide or the other. That’s why average is over.

This insight clarifies many key issues, such as how we should reform our education; where new jobs will come from and why (some) wages might start rising again; which regions will see skyrocketing real estate prices and which will empty out; why some companies will get smarter and smarter, while others just try to ship product out the door; which human beings will earn a lot more and which workers will move to low-rent areas to make ends meet; and how shopping, dating, and meeting negotiations will all change.

What lies ahead of us will be a very surprising time, and it is likely that new technologies already emerging will lead us out of what I called in a previous book "the great stagnation." It is true that there has been a persistent slowdown in real economic growth in the Western world and Japan, but this book suggests how that might plausibly change. It is not the new technologies per se; it is how some of us will use them.

The technology of intelligent machines may conjure up science fiction visions of rebellious robots or computers that feel and maybe fall in love or proclaim themselves to be gods. The reality of the progress on the ground is based on an integration of capabilities rather than on any one thing that might be described as "artificial intelligence." What is happening is an increase in the ability of machines to substitute for intelligent human labor, whether we wish to call those machines "AI," "software," "smart phones," "superior hardware and storage," "better integrated systems," or any combination of the above. This is the wave that will lift you or that will dump you.

The fascination with technology and the future of work has inspired some fascinating writings, including Martin Ford’s classic The Lights in the Tunnel, the more recent and excellent eBook Race Against the Machine China by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, and Ray Kurzweil’s futuristic work on how humans will meld with technology. Debates about mechanization periodically resurface, most prominently in the 1930s and in the 1960s but now once again in our new millennium. Average Is Over builds upon these influential works and attempts to go beyond them in terms of detail and breadth. In these pages I paint a vision of a future which at first appears truly strange, but at least to me is also discomfortingly familiar and indeed intuitive. As a blogger and economics writer, I find that the question I receive most often from readers is—by far—something like: "What will the low- and mid-skilled jobs of the future look like?" This question is on everyone’s mind with a new urgency but it goes back to David Ricardo and Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century. Ricardo was a leading economist of his time who wrote on "the machinery question," while Babbage was the intellectual father of the modern computer and he—not coincidentally—also wrote on how radical mechanization was going to reshape work.

These questions have reemerged as culturally central because we are at the crux of a technological revolution once again. It’s becoming increasingly clear that mechanized intelligence can solve a rapidly expanding repertoire of problems. Solutions began appearing on the margins of the world’s interests. Deep Blue, an IBM computer, defeated the then– world champion Garry Kasparov in a chess match in 1997. Watson, a computer program, beat Ken Jennings—the human champion—on Jeopardy! in 2010, surpassing most expectations as to how quickly this would happen. Interesting developments, yes, but the technological news is becoming more central to our concerns.

We’re on the verge of having computer systems that understand the entirety of human "natural language," a problem that was considered a very tough one only a few years ago. Just talk to Siri on your iPhone and she is likely to understand your voice, give you the right answer, and help you make an appointment. Siri disappoints with its mistakes and frequently obtuse responses, but it—or its competitors—will improve rapidly with more data and with assistance from crowd-sourced recommendations and improvements. We’re close to the point where the available knowledge at the hands of the individual, for questions that can be posed clearly and articulately, is not so far from the knowledge of the entire world. Whether it is through Siri, Google, or Wikipedia, there is now almost always a way to ask and—more importantly—a way to receive the answer in relatively digestible form.

It must be emphasized that every time you use Google you are relying on machine intelligence. Every time Facebook recommends a new friend for you or sends an ad your way. Every time you use GPS to find your way to a party.

Don’t write off those robots either, even if they may never pray to God or pass for human beings. In 2011 Taiwan- based Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer, announced a plan to increase the use of robots in its factories one hundredfold within three years, bringing the total to one million robots. After recent wage increases in China—to levels still low by Western standards—the company doesn’t consider its labor so cheap anymore. In the United States as well, the use of industrial robots is booming, and the likely future for North America is that of a coherent economic unit where the United States, Canada, and Mexico band together to make major investments in customized robot production and then use these investments to dominate global manufacturing.

Robot-guided mechanical arms are common in the operating room, and computers spend more time flying our planes than do the pilots. South Korea is experimenting with robotic prison wardens that patrol when the inmates do something wrong and report the misdeeds.

Driverless cars are already operating on the streets of Berlin and Nevada, and Florida and California have passed bills to legalize computer-commanded "driverless cars" on their roads. Google’s team has test-driven hundreds of thousands of miles with these cars, so far without an accident or major incident; the one reported five-car pileup happened after a human took over from the computer. Some Google employees have their self-driving vehicles take them to work. These car robots don’t look like something from The Jetsons; the driverless features on these cars are a bunch of sensors, wires, and software. This technology works.

There is now a joke that "a modern textile mill employs only a man and a dog—the man to feed the dog, and the dog to keep the man away from the machines."

From Average Is Over by Tyler Cowen. Copyright 2013 Tyler Cowen. Excerpted by permission of Dutton Adult and imprint of Penguin Group USA.
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Some 4.2 million mortgage borrowers are either seriously delinquent or have had their cases referred to lawyers to pursue foreclosure auctions, according to LPS Applied Analytics. Of those, two-thirds have made no payments at all for at least a year, and nearly one-third have gone more than two years.
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…..item 2)…. Yahoo! Finance … Foreclosure limbo: Staying without paying. … CNNmoney.com

Les Christie, On Thursday June 9, 2011, 9:45 am EDT

finance.yahoo.com/news/Foreclosure-limbo-Staying-cnnm-989...

Charles and Jill Segal have not made a mortgage payment in nearly five years — but they continue to live in their five-bedroom West Palm Beach, Fla. home.

Lynn, from St. Petersburg, Fla., has been living without paying for three years.

In Thousand Oaks, Calif., an actor has missed 30 payments, and still, he has not lost his home.

They’re not alone.

These cases can go on and on. Nationwide, it takes an average of 565 days to foreclose on borrowers in default from their first missed payments to the final auction. In New York, the average is 800 days and in Florida, where the "robo-signing" issue is particularly combative, it’s 807.

If they want to fight evictions hard, borrowers can remain in their homes even longer while their cases are being worked through.

The Segals have been doing that — in court. They bought their home in 2003 with an adjustable rate mortgage. After a few years, their monthly payments tripled to ,000, just as their home-inspection business was cratering.

The Segals want the bank to modify the mortgage so payments are affordable, and they think the court will agree that their lender put them into a toxic loan.

"The evidence will show that we were defrauded," said Jill Segal.

If they lose, of course, they’ll finally have to leave. And, unfortunately, more than 50 months of missed mortgage payments hasn’t translated into big savings.

"It’s very hard to save," said Jill Segal. "Our company’s billing is 90% off and my husband is only working about four days a week."

Lynn, who didn’t want her last name used, purchased a two-bedroom on Tampa Bay in 1998 for 5,000.

As the waterfront property’s value skyrocketed, eventually reaching 0,000, she refinanced twice (once to expand a business), and took out a second mortgage. She now owes more than 0,000 on the home, which is worth only 5,000.

Living in this foreclosure limbo is "Hell," Lynn said. "I feel like I’m locked in a box. I work for a financial organization and if this came out, it could cost me my job."

She’s still hoping to negotiate the loan. In the meantime, small things bother her. "A couple years ago, I lost my dog and I can’t decide on getting a new one," she said. If she has to move, she can’t be sure she’ll go somewhere that allows pets.

The actor from Thousand Oaks, Calif. began having problems during the screenwriters’ strike in late 2007, followed by a threat of a strike by the Screen Actors Guild.

He’s working with his lender toward a mortgage modification, submitting page after page of documents, which the bank has often misplaced or waited so long to examine them that they had grown too old to use.

His ideal outcome is get the loan modified and get all his late fees waived. He feels entitled to that because the bank advised him to stopped paying in the first place to qualify for one of the government’s foreclosure programs. Before that, he had missed only one payment.

Meanwhile, he has cobbled together some income streams — small acting parts, teaching acting classes and even handyman work.

"In a way, I feel like I’m lucky because I haven’t had to pay any ‘rent’ for 30 months," he said.

But he feels like he’s always under a cloud. "I haven’t slept in three years," he said. "It’s terrifying. I have to have the ultimate poker face in front of my kids."

Ruben Martinez, a Staten Island, N.Y., man trapped in a particularly bad adjustable rate mortgage, stopped paying more than three years ago. His attorney, Robert Brown, has managed to stave off one foreclosure.

Martinez, still struggling to find work, has little in savings despite the missed payments. He’s earning some income as a pastor and consulting for a non-profit family counseling organization.

"There’s pressure on me every day," he said. "I have a wife, three daughters and two grandchildren. Where are we going to live?"
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American Mailboxes – Hope Street … Tired Of Inequality? (September 12, 2013 3:05 AM) — Read an excerpt of Average Is Over …item 3.. Hundreds Are Laid Off (Tue 9:15 PM, Dec 10, 2013) …

Image by marsmet474
"I don’t know. I don’t know where it goes from here," explained Justin Hughes one of the 250 White Springs Potash Corporation Employees who lost their job last week.
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…..item 1)…. Tired Of Inequality? One Economist Says It’ll Only Get Worse …

… NPR … www.npr.org/2013/ … arts & life > books > author interviews

by NPR STAFF
September 12, 2013 3:05 AM

www.npr.org/2013/09/12/221425582/tired-of-inequality-one-…

img code photo … Economist Tyler Cowen

media.npr.org/assets/img/2013/09/11/istock_000006025149xs…

Economist Tyler Cowen believes that income inequality in America is only increasing. His new book is called Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation.

Szasz-Fabian Ilka Erika / iStockphoto.com

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img code photo …. Average Is over

media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/a/average-is-over…

Average Is Over
Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
by Tyler Cowen

Hardcover, 290 pages purchase
digital culture
nonfiction
science & health
business & economy