Labor

Ever since the gold report was published, the gold price moved up. This caught several investors by surprise, as some of them even continued to dump gold, scared by what appeared to be a good jobs report.

‘Appeared to be’, because?

Yes, 227,000 new jobs were created, and we can’t deny that’s a positive evolution. However, the increased job number is also the only positive thing in the jobs report, and there are two other issues that haven’t really been highlighted.

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via PeakProsperity.com,

In the modern era, the phrase Class War is rooted in the socialist/Marxist concept that the conflict between labor (the working class) and capital (owners of capital) is not just inevitable - it’s the fulcrum of history.  In this view, this Class War is the inevitable result of the asymmetry between the elite who own/control the capital and the much larger class of people whose livelihood is earned solely by their labor.

Submitted by David Galland via The Passing Parade

One of the more interesting mental exercises related to predicting the future involves trying to fathom the impact the rise of robots will have on humanity.

We can be quite sure that in the proverbial blink, robots will be doing all the war fighting. After that, what’s the point? But does that then lead to the sort of robotic apocalypse so well envisioned in Terminator?

Submitted by Emily Zanotti via HeatSt.com,

A study by a British think tank, Reform, says that 90% of British civil service workers have jobs so pointless, they could easily be replaced by robots, saving the government around $8 billion per year.

Moments ago a federal judge blocked health insurer Anthem from acquiring rival Cigna, the second court ruling in recent weeks to deal a decisive blow to health insurers seeking consolidation as a cure to the substantially higher operating costs plaguing the industry as a result of Obamacare.  The ruling echoed a decision by a different judge last month who blocked Aetna’s plans to take over Humana.  Though the two proposed insurer combinations were different in many ways, both judges found that merging top industry rivals threatened higher prices without the necessary patient benefits to of