[PRCo] Re: New York Times Streetcar Article

[Richard Allman]

yeah, Fred values truly count! Something more than first person singular and 
what feels good at this minute. turning over outhouse, or some of our 
college pranks are an order of magnitude different from shooting someone for 
sneakers or  some perverse concept of "respect."
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Schneider Fred" <fwschneider at comcast.net>
To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2008 6:39 PM
Subject: [PRCo] Re: New York Times Streetcar Article


> Employment and unemployment are essential reciprocals.   Income and
> quality of work are related.   Crime is generally a factor of age;
> people in the corrections game can predict the number of cells they
> are going to need 18 years out just by looking at the number of births.
>
> If they get past a certain age without getting caught, they generally
> straighten out.   We all know the kids in our school that got caught
> stealing someone's car as a prank but later became pillars of
> society.   In our parent's generation the kids turned over out
> houses.   There was a great line in a 1900 edition of the Lancaster
> New Era where the editor or a writer was opining "What is this new
> generation coming to?"   Some kid down east near Paradise was caught
> throwing rocks at windows of passing passenger trains.   Isn't that
> why we use Lexan for glazing today?
>
> And Rich, you and I have had this discussion before ... the one where
> I asked why we had a higher share of people incarcerated than any
> other developed nation.   And India had one of the lowest shares and
> some of the poorest people.   That was before I went to India.   Now
> I'll drop the other shoe.   I never that same feeling of insecurity
> in Delhi that I have had at 54th and Lansdowne Avenues in West
> Philly.   Might it be that religion in India plays a major part in
> their lives and we have dropped it out of our lives?   Does that have
> something to do with why our cities are unsafe?
>
> I'm not condemning, Rich.  I'm only asking questions.
>
> On Aug 19, 2008, at 10:28 PM, Richard Allman wrote:
>
>> that's if employment is the whole story; income, crime, quality of
>> work,
>> etc. and may other thing are quality of life markers!
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Schneider Fred" <fwschneider at comcast.net>
>> To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
>> Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2008 7:24 PM
>> Subject: [PRCo] Re: New York Times Streetcar Article
>>
>>
>>> Damn, I pushed send accidentally.  Let's copy and paste and start
>>> over.
>>>
>>> Except that in terms of unemployment and employment, Harrisburg is as
>>> good as any place.   The areas east and south of the mountains in
>>> Pennsylvania (and outside of Philadelphia County) have since the
>>> 1960s had a better economic picture than the national averages.  They
>>> still do.   Seasonally-adjusted unemployment in Harrisburg-Carlisle
>>> was 4.4 percent in June, the USA rate was 5.5.  Perhaps the Inquirer
>>> just wanted to make someplace else seem worse than Philadelphia?
>>>
>>> Certainly the city of Harrisburg has its bad neighborhoods.   Inner
>>> Susquehanna Township is not too great.  Parts of Steelton leave
>>> something to be desired.   But remember my earlier point that capital
>>> cities have always been a magnet for people who could find work
>>> elsewhere, particularly minority races and ethnicities.
>>>
>>> Hartford's rate was 5.7 on an unadjusted basis in June -- identical
>>> to the national rate.
>>>
>>> Charleston WV in June had an unemployment rate of 4.8% unadjusted
>>> seasonally, which was well under the national 5.5% rate.   If memory
>>> serves, there were a lot of chemical jobs in Charleston at one
>>> time.   I suspect that area has a large elderly population and a lot
>>> of people who are no longer in the labor force.
>>>
>>> Of 49 major labor market areas in the United States ... those with a
>>> population of a million people or more ... Richmond tied with Seattle
>>> and Baltimore for 7th lowest unemployment in June 2008.  The
>>> seasonally adjusted rate was 4.5 percent.
>>>
>>> The Philadelphia MSA (Camden, Burlington, Gloucester, Philadelphia,
>>> Montgomery, Bucks, Chester, Delaware counties), which the Inquirer
>>> was bragging about, came in 19th position.   Pittsburgh is actually
>>> stronger these days than Philadelphia, largely because the elderly
>>> are not looking for work.
>>>
>>> One of our strong suits, Rich, has been health services, principally
>>> because it was exportable.  It brought Euros, Pounds, Yen and other
>>> strong currencies into the United States.   If the dollar continues
>>> to weaken, the hospitals could be in a strong competitive position.
>>> But over the last few weeks the dollar has rallied from 63 cents to
>>> the Euro to 68 cents and this could hurt people looking for medical
>>> care in the U.S.
>>>
>>> I will agree that all business have a finite term.   I often thought
>>> it was one generation.   The founder knew what he wanted to
>>> produce.   He knew his market.   He understood his product.   His
>>> successor often neither understood it or bought the firm simply to
>>> liquidate it to eliminate competition.   If nothing else, changes in
>>> a business cycle force a firm to either change or go out of
>>> business.    Coal was the big thing in the 19th and early 20th
>>> century.   Then Ed. Drake drilled a well at Titusville and introduced
>>> us to a new liquid fossil fuel and now we are running out of that.
>>> You want another example ... for years we got our news by word of
>>> mouth or smoke signals, then came newspapers and magazines, then in
>>> 1920 KDKA went on the air and we eventually we had news by radio.
>>> In the early 1950s Pittsburghers started getting the miracle of
>>> television ... I think the first nearby station might have been in
>>> Johnstown.   I remember the first televised national Republican
>>> convention when Eisenhower was nominated in 1952.   Today I have BBC
>>> World News and Deutschewelle bookmarked on my computer.   Even some
>>> of the major manufactured goods like linoleum only lasted about 35
>>> years.   So if the commodities we produce have a finite production
>>> life, so should the work force that produces them and the towns in
>>> which they live.  The only difference is that since the industrial
>>> revolution, cities have become so huge that we no longer have ghost
>>> towns like we did with extractive economies.
>>>
>>> But my point remains that for many years government was the expanding
>>> employer in capital cities that tended to provided enough new jobs
>>> that it kept unemployment lower in the capitals than many other
>>> cities in those states.   And, as you can see, even the worst cases
>>> you cited Rich, are not all that bad.
>>>
>>> And some capitals are astounding.   I remember little Wyoming had as
>>> many people in it as Lancaster County, Pennsylvania when I first went
>>> there in the early 1970s ... something over 300,000.   Today Wyoming
>>> is closer to 500,000.   But the capital, Cheyenne has gone from
>>> 41,000 people to 53,000.  Most cities get smaller!
>>>
>>> Even so I continually marveled at how my counterparts in the smaller
>>> states got more work done with fewer people than we did in
>>> Pennsylvania because they were not arguing over petty things.   Some
>>> of the smaller states like Wyoming or Nevada or Montana or Utah could
>>> take their excess staff resources and use them to bid on outsourced
>>> jobs from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington DC.  The
>>> bigger states like California, Texas, New York and Pennsylvania were
>>> having enough trouble just getting their huge staffs to do their own
>>> work.   For several years I was the director of an occupational
>>> statistics program in Pennsylvania intended by the bureaucrats in
>>> Washington to solve all the school problems and make all the kids get
>>> better jobs in the future.   Bull shit.   The lady who was my
>>> counterpart in Nevada was very frank.   She said we only have two
>>> labor market areas ... Reno and Las Vegas.   The rest of the state
>>> doesn't count.   I figure I can work myself out of a job in six
>>> months and go on to something else.   Fabulous.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Aug 19, 2008, at 6:11 PM, Richard Allman wrote:
>>>
>>>> what about our great state capital city? Unless I'm missing
>>>> something, it's
>>>> still a dump. A few years ago the Inquirer ran an article entitled
>>>> something
>>>> like "Harrisburg:Is this any place to have a state capital?" and
>>>> subtitled
>>>> "not  even a nice place to visit" (as oppposed to places that are
>>>> nowhere to
>>>> live but nice enough to visit.) Then a litany of what ailed.
>>>> Haven't been in
>>>> the city since Fred Schneider's retirement do, but his departure
>>>> cannot
>>>> possibly have helped matters! Then there's Hartford, Conn, a ontime
>>>> very
>>>> pleasant , vibrant place which is now downright scary-I was there a
>>>> couple
>>>> years ago and it's really hit the skids. As one involved in
>>>> healthcare,
>>>> trust me it takes more than hospitals to sustain a region. Richmond
>>>> VA has
>>>> seen better times as well. And Charleton, W Va-did it ever flourish?
>>>>
>>>> RICH
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> From: "Derrick J Brashear" <shadow at dementia.org>
>>>> To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
>>>> Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2008 3:25 PM
>>>> Subject: [PRCo] Re: New York Times Streetcar Article
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> On Mon, 18 Aug 2008, Joshua Dunfield wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On 2008-08-17, Fred Schneider <fwschneider at comcast.net> wrote:
>>>>>>>  The only state capital that comes to my mind that is having
>>>>>>>  real economic problems is Trenton NJ, which for years had a
>>>>>>> sign on
>>>>>>>  the bridge over the Delaware River that read, TRENTON MAKES, THE
>>>>>>>  WORLD TAKES.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The sign's still there; you can see it from the R7/Amtrak.
>>>>>
>>>>> DRJTC (I think, rather than DRPA) owns the bridge, and it's
>>>>> "toll-supported" unlike the adjacent US1 highway bridge.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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