stupid, stupid, stupid

I have a horrible cold right now, and can’t stop coughing up crud, and have about half a voice. This is intensely frustrating.

On top of that, I’ve been fighting everyone’s favorite passive-aggressive OS, Windows.  databeast handed me a spare LiteOn SH-16A7S SATA DVD burner this weekend to swap into vorlon in place of my NEC ND-3520AW, which would have enabled me to completely disable legacy PATA on vorlon and install the NEC into one of the two machines currently lacking a CDROM drive.  (We’ve had three CDROM drives fail in about the last year.)  Except that Windows 2000 wouldn’t talk to the SH-16A7S properly and insisted it was just a CDROM drive.  I couldn’t update the driver because LiteOn never released a separate driver for that model drive.  So I swapped the NEC back in ... and then found that Win2K was being difficult about recognizing that again as well.  (I managed to get it working again after flashing it with the latest v3.40 NEC ND-3520AW firmware, but now Win2K thinks it’s a Freecom DVD+/-RW1686 instead of an NEC.  But at least it’s writing CDs now.)  This little venture, on top of already being sick and cranky, pushed my frustration level pretty much to saturation point.

So when my cell phone, sitting on the shelf above my desk plugged into its charger, fell down for the third time this morning, scattering stuff from where it landed that hit me for the third time this morning, I just grabbed the phone and threw it away from me. Unfortunately, rather than fortuitously landing somewhere soft, it hit the bank desk on the other side of the room and basically smashed on impact. It’s a Motorola RAZR V3i, and even though it was closed, it snapped in half at the hinge, breaking the hinge off on one side and tearing the mylar ribbon connectors that link the two halves of the phone.

I really, really, REALLY hate when I do stupid things like this in a moment of frustration overload.  Especially when we can’t really spare the money to replace it right now.

(On a related subject, why is it that no phone manufacturer seems willing or able to make a clamshell phone that doesn’t have buttons placed on the outside edges where you’re likely to accidentally push them when simply handling the phone?)

Theory and practice

According to Donald Luskin of Trend Macrolytics, writing in SmartMoney, Robert J. Gordon, “an acclaimed macroeconomist and professor at Northwestern University”, says the recession is over.  He cites as evidence for this that there appears to have been a peak on jobless claims, and asserts that “in every recession since 1974, the peak in jobless claims came within weeks of the bottom of the recession.”

One notices, however, that this excludes the 1970-71 recession, which had a double peak.  And in the 1980 recession, the peak of jobless claims came slightly before halfway through the recession.

But there’s another problem with this theory.  In this graph, the best example of it comes in the 1982-83 recession, where the jobless rate peaked, then dipped ... then rose again to higher levels, and peaked, and dipped ... then rose again to still higher levels.  At neither of those two interim dips — or even after the third peak — would it have been possible to say with certainty that the jobless rate had hit its highest point and was now headed monotonically back down.

So why does Professor Gordon think he can predict that now?  Yes, the jobless rate has dipped.  Unless he has a crystal ball or a time machine, he can have no way of telling whether it will rise again.  He could be right, and it would be nice if he’s right.  But at the moment, it’s a premature judgement.  Time will tell whether he’s right or wrong.