Good Morning

 How not to wake up - muscle cramps in both calves.

I do not know where Monday evening went: I read some emails, I continued through my pretrial detention journal, I went to McClure's, and I cooked a pork loin in the crock pot (it came out rather nicely).

riddlebird sent me a notice that its latest edition is online. I am looking at the story Christmas Interruptus by Laury A. Egan. I like its opening:

Being alone was Kay’s normal state. She had no family and only a few friends living nearby. Most had moved away or were gone. Seriously gone. Like dead. At seventy-three, dealing with an avalanche of medical issues, Kay was fast approaching the same black-hole fate. And Covid still scared her—dare she say it?—scared her to death and had heaped isolation on top of a widowed lifestyle.

Covid, Christmas, cell phones. Quite amusing.

Apex Magazine also has a new issue.

From The Muncie Star-Press, Hicks: Job creation numbers are deceptive:

Political leaders from governor to town council will use these jobs numbers to claim success at job creation. All of this presets the question: What do these job creation numbers tell us? The short answer is mostly not a darned thing. A few examples make that clear.

In the last full year for which we have data, 2021, the IEDC claimed a record 31,710 jobs created in the state. That represents a great deal of work from a small number of employees, who deal with more than one new business every day throughout the year. It was also their record year to that date, but there’s a catch.

That number represents only about 1.3 percent of the jobs created in Indiana in 2021. As it turns out, the U.S. Department of Labor and the Census do a good job counting job flows. In each year examined, the amount of new workers in each quarter alone runs around 600,000 jobs. At the same time, the state lost about 575,000 jobs in each quarter.

So, in 2022, the state actually had 101,299 new jobs created. That isn’t the number from IEDC, it is the difference between the jobs created and the jobs destroyed that year. Of course, a good share of those jobs lost were from turnover. Some industries turn over one-third of their workers each quarter.

It is almost 6. I need to get ready for work.

sch