perspective
Layoffs Considered... Beneficial?
The United States is in the midst of its worst recession since the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s, and arguably before that. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down almost 25% from its all-time high in October 2007 to $10,850. The NASDAQ is down about 15% from its all-time high from November 2007. But while seeing layoffs in this economic climate hasn’t been a surprise, the sheer number of them has. The unemployment rate has more than doubled since April 2008 to 9.7% as of the time of this writing (March 2010), and Forbes estimates the number of layoffs since November 2008 at the Fortune 500 alone to be 697,448. And the problem is likely worse than that due to “shadow layoffs” that aren’t reported.
But you know layoffs are a big deal when they spawn an Oscar nominated film starring George Clooney.
Regina Spektor's A Pretty Smart Girl
I’ve been listening to one of my Pandora stations based on Gravity by Sara Bareilles (who is awesome, by the way) a lot lately. Ingrid Michaelson has been a happy discovery from this station, as has Brooke Fraser. I’d never heard of either of them, but by the power of the Music Genome Project I now have 2 new artists I really like and can listen to them every day. For free.
Pandora is so cool.
Anyway, the point of all this is that On the Radio by Regina Spektor just came on. This song has come on my Pandora before, and I’ve listened to it and liked it, but for whatever reason these lyrics really stopped me tonight as I was working:
