Workers have not benefited from productivity growth in almost four decades
Source: http://www.epi.org/press/workers-benefited-productivity-growth-decades/
The vast majority of workers have not benefited from productivity growth in the United States since the mid-1970s, a new EPI paper finds. The greatest divergence between the growth of productivity and a typical worker’s compensation has occurred in the period since 2000. In contrast, from 1948 to 1973, workers did benefit as their pay grew in tandem with productivity, resulting in higher living standards across the board.
….
Mishel identifies the following wedges between the growth of productivity and median compensation:
- The share of income that is wage income for workers has decreased as, correspondingly, the share for unearned income (dividends, interest, profits) accruing to wealth holders has increased.
- The compensation of the median worker has grown much more slowly than compensation for the highest-paid workers.
- Workers have suffered worsening terms of trade, meaning the price growth of things workers buy has grown more quickly than the price growth of things workers produce.
….
Amazing Human Engineering – Water Road Intersection(Wasserstraßenkreuz), Magdeburg, Germany
Canal engineers had first conceived of joining the two waterways as far back as 1919, and by 1938 the Rothensee boat lift and bridge anchors were in place, but construction was postponed during World War II. After the Cold War split Germany, the project was put on hold indefinitely by the East German government.
The reunification of Germany and establishment of major water transport routes made the Water Bridge a priority again. Work started in 1997, with construction taking six years and costing €500 million. The water bridge now connects Berlin’s inland harbour network with the ports along the Rhine river. The aqueduct’s trough structure incorporates 24,000 tonnes of steel and 68,000 cubic meters of concrete.
American History Facebook Style!
I came across this copy of American history Facebook style in my random Internet roamings and i simply could not resist. This is somehow extremely fitting and indicative of our zeitgeist and the way we relate to reality.
Source and Copyright:
http://www.nytimes.com
The Sun. Witness to a Great Antinomy?
The late Gerardus van der Leeuw once said:
“Here we approach the great cleavage in the self-consciousness of mankind. On the one side, time takes a cyclical course, on the other it has a beginning before which there was nothing and an end with which it stops. On the one side, every sunrise is a victory over chaos, every festival a cosmic beginning, every sowing a new creation, every holy place a foundation of the cosmos, every historical event a rise or fall according to the regular course of the world, and even the law that sustains society is nothing other than the rule of the sun’s course. . . . On the other side, everything is exactly the same except that at a certain point in the cycle someone appears who proclaims a definitive event, the day of Yahweh, the last judgment, the ultimate salvation, or the final conflict as in Iran.
The images used are all borrowed from the course of nature: day and night, summer and winter. But the ethos has changed; a hiatus has been made, a lempus in the strict sense, which changes everything. . . . This final time revolutionizes the course of the world”
Picture Source:
Here Comes the Sun
Picture Notes:
In this handout photo released by Nasa Earth Observatory on June 7, 2011 and taken from Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, sunspot complex 1226-1227, shows the Sun unleashing an M-2 (medium-sized) solar flare, an S1-class radiation storm and a coronal mass ejection resulting in a large cloud of particles mushrooming up and falling back down giving the impression of covering an area of almost half the solar surface. An unusual solar flare observed by a NASA space observatory on June 7 could cause some disruptions to satellite communications and power on Earth over the next day or so, officials said. The potent blast from the Sun unleashed a firestorm of radiation on a level not witnessed since 2006, and will likely lead to moderate geomagnetic storm activity by Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service. (NASA)
Who got the short end of the stick? – Wealthiest people get richer
World’s wealthiest people now richer than before the credit crunch
World Wealth Report reveals soaring numbers of rich individuals in Asia Pacific region. The world’s wealthiest get richer and richer.
The globe’s richest have now recouped the losses they suffered after the 2008 banking crisis. They are richer than ever, and there are more of them – nearly 11 million – than before the recession struck.
Source:
World’s wealthiest people
Jill Treanor
Guardian, 22 June 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jun/22/worlds-wealthiest-people-now-richer-than-before-the-credit-crunch
Picture Copyright: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anth3000/
Related articles
- The Rich Are Growing, What They Do With Their Money (BAC) (247wallst.com)
- The rich get richer as the rest of America is screwed (rt.com)
- Report: More Asian millionaires than European ones (ctv.ca)
- Asia’s millionaire population overtakes Europe (theglobeandmail.com)
- Asia surpasses Europe in millionaires and wealth (whitelocust.wordpress.com)
- India now has 153,000 millionaires; 12th highest in world (mathilic.wordpress.com)
What is Fantasy or Phantasy? – Then and Now
For the Greeks, “phantasia” denoted this special faculty in the mind for producing poetic, abstract, and religious imagery. Phantasia is our capacity to ” make visible” the contents of the inner world by giving them form, by personifying them. The Greek took for granted the reality of the inner world, expressed as ideal forms or universal qualities that clothed themselves in the divine images of their gods. For them, phantasia was the organ by which that divine world spoke to the human mind.
Yet, for some peculiar reason, we have lost the concept of the reality associated with fantasy and turned it into this:
Fantasy: “the power or process of creating especially unrealistic or improbable mental images in response to psychological need<an object of fantasy>; also : a mental image or a series of mental images (as a daydream) so created.
