Analysis shows increase in the percentage of teenagers and twenty-somethings outside the labor force
Nearly 40% of people in the United States ages 16 to 24 say that
they don’t want a job, accounting for a sizable portion of the 92
million Americans who are currently outside the labor force, according
to a new analysis of labor statistics.
The figures do not include young people who aren’t working, but are
actively seeking employment. About 10% of Americans aged 20 to 24 and
19% of those aged 16 to 19 are considered unemployed, which means they are actively seeking work.
According to Pew Research Center analysis
of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, 39.4% of men and women aged 16 to
24 are outside the labor force over the first 10 months of 2014. That’s
up from 29.5% in 2000, the steepest rise of any age group and one that
pre-dates the recent financial crisis.
The U.S. unemployment hit 5.8% last month, the lowest number since 2008.
What hope is there for a middle-aged woman in today’s dating scene? After her divorce, Stella Grey went online to find out ‘Inside the anonymity of a dating site, nothing can be relied on at face value. That might not even be his face.’Photograph: David Levene/Guardian
To discover in mid-life that your long-term partner is
having an affair is a shocking thing, and being single again takes a lot
of getting used to. Earlier this year, having healed sufficiently to
move from vodka to wine, it occurred to me that I needed to meet new
people. And by people, I mean men.
A friend suggested internet dating. She’d been doing it for
two years. Most people in the online pool were odd, or dull or nuts, or
love rats, she said, (I assumed she was exaggerating), but it was a lot
more fun than slippers, Sudoku and the gramophone.
I signed up to the biggest of the no-cost sites, filled in
the questionnaire, posted a photograph that hinted at hidden depth and
took two hours to write and polish my profile, distilling life
experience and interests into nuggets, and offering fascinating glimpses
of my inner world. Gratifyingly, half an hour later I had two messages.
The first said: “Hello sexy. You look very squeezable. First, can I ask
– do you eat meat? I couldn’t kiss someone who consumes the flesh of
tortured animals.”
The second said: “Hi. I can see from your face that you have
shadows in your heart. I think I can help.” I hit the reply button and
asked how he was going to do that. “I will shine a great light upon
you,” he wrote.
I logged off and sat for a while, staring at the screen.
Then I logged on again, to see if anyone else had written yet. There was
a message from someone called Freddie. It said “Hi” and was followed by
nine inappropriate kisses. I had a look at Freddie’s profile. All he’d
written was “Honest, caring, tactile man, looking for sensual woman.
Please no game players, gold diggers, cheats or serial liars.”
Most people’s profiles say nothing about them. They could be
anyone. Everybody loves holidays and music and films and food, and
wants to travel the world. Everyone has a good sense of humour, works
hard and likes country weekends; everybody loves a sofa, a DVD and a
bottle of wine. So far, so conventional. But sometimes the people who
have a lot to say about themselves can prove the more dangerous. Inside
the anonymity of a dating site, nothing can be taken at face value. That
might not even be his face.
Once you realise this, it becomes ever more obvious that you
really have little idea who you’re talking to. Recently, I had a
conversation that lasted weeks with an engaging, cultured, witty man who
was a lecturer at a university, until I checked and found that he
wasn’t. When I told the dating friend, she said: “Sometimes I’m
confident and sometimes taking on a second-hand man is like going to the
dog refuge and picking a stray, not knowing what its real history is or
how it might react under pressure.”
At first I signed up to every mainstream site I could find
and afford, a total of nine (since whittled down to four, only two of
them fee-paying). Online dating is big business and it’s easy to see
why. Basically, it’s money for old rope. If you build it, they will
come. Create a search engine and a messaging system, then stand back and
let people find one another. It’s a great big dance hall, though
without the alcohol or the band. Or the hall.
I started with men in my own city, of about the same age,
education and outlook. This didn’t go well. The last thing most divorced
men want is women of the same age, education and outlook. You protest:
this is unfair. I can only tell you of my own experience, which is that
mid-life men have high expectations, a situation exacerbated by being
outnumbered three to one by women. But I didn’t know this then. I was
like a labrador let off its lead at the park, bounding up to people
expecting to make friends. A chatty introduction email went off to a
dozen men who lived within a five-mile radius. When there were no
replies, I couldn’t believe it. I thought something was wrong with the
message system, but found one of the non-repliers had removed the three
things from his likes and dislikes list that I’d mentioned I also liked.
Withnail & I, dark chocolate, rowing boats: all deleted. Another
man had blocked me so I couldn’t write again. This was awful and
humiliating. There’s nothing like being judged unworthy even of being
replied to that’s so powerful a reminder that, in this context, you’re
essentially a commodity.
Not that this is everyone’s experience. I know of dating
site marriages. Well, one. Admittedly the woman in question is a
goddess. The goddesses (at least the under-40 ones) are probably swamped
with offers. But I’m 50, and not the cheek-bony sort of 50 with swishy
hair, either. All the dating-site gods (tall, articulate, successful,
well-travelled; they don’t even have to be handsome) were swishing right
past me.
I asked my friend Jack for a male appraisal of my dating
site profile. He said it was lovely, like me. That was worrying. I
needed clarification.
“Well. You expect a lot. You make it clear you only want clever, funny, high-achieving men.”
“I don’t say high-achieving. I don’t say that anywhere.”
“You say it without saying it. And it’s clear you’re successful. You’re alpha. That puts men off. I’m just saying.”
“So what should I do? Claim to be a flight attendant with a love of seamed stockings?”
“That would get you a lot of attention. But then you’d need to follow through.”
“I’d have to study the British Airways flight routes and talk about layovers.”
“Every middle-aged man in the world dreams of layovers,” Jack said, looking wistful.
He helped rewrite the copy so that I sounded more fun,
though not as fun as Jack wanted me to sound. There was an immediate
response.
“Reading between the lines, I think you’re holding out for
something unusual. I believe I’m atypical. For a start, I don’t have
a television. When I had one I spent a lot of time shouting at it.” I
said I couldn’t bear to watch Question Time either. “No, no,” he said.
“Countryfile, for instance. Countryfile’s really annoying.” I asked him
what he did in the evenings. He said he spent a lot of time with his
lizards.
I told the dating site veteran that I was having a poor
response rate to the advertisement for my heart and soul. She was
shocked that I was admitting to being 50. I should change it and say I
was 40; lots of men had a search cut-off point of 40 and weren’t even
seeing me on their lists. I considered this. Did I want those kind of
men, who judged people by their numbers? Would waist measurement be the
next thing? Another friend said that the first friend was right. When
she was truthful and said she was 54, she’d heard only from
70-year-olds. The 54-year-old men were all talking to the 35-year-olds,
though they’d consider women of 40 at a push. “List yourself at 40 and
confess to 50 later,” she said. “I did it. Nobody minded. They were
doing it themselves, to beat the system.”
I had qualms. “Don’t have qualms; it’s routine. Women knock 10 years off their age, and men add three inches.”
During the week that I was 40, my mailbox filled up. The
trouble was, they were all messages from men who thought I was 40. When I
confessed, nobody wanted to meet. One man said that he’d guessed; in
fact, wasn’t 50 a bit of a stretch? He thought I was probably older than
that. The fourth strung me along a while. What kind of 50 was I? I was a
spirited, cool, unusual 50, I said (desperately). I still wore
plimsolls and had a silly sense of humour, I said, citing Monty Python. I
still bopped to 80s classics in the kitchen. “Good for you, but I’m not
interested, not remotely,” he wrote. “I’m not ever going to embark on a
relationship that began with a lie.”
The first dinner offer came from Trevor, an American expat
in London. Trevor had been dumped and was only just passing out of
denial and into acceptance, he said. He was doing the work but it was
hard. Four thousand words of backstory followed. In return, I gave him
mine. Another great long email arrived, talking philosophically about
life and quoting writers. It was charming, endearing; I reciprocated
with my own thoughts, quoting other writers. We were all set. Then, the
day before dinner, he cancelled. The last line of his message said:
“To be honest, I’m not interested in a woman who’s my intellectual
equal.”
The first real-world meeting was for coffee, in town, in the
afternoon, with an HR manager who was between meetings. A short, sharp
interview that I failed. I didn’t mind too much. He was horrible:
pursed-mouthed, unforthcoming, with dyed black hair and the demeanour of
a vampire. Determined to exorcise the bad first date, I agreed to
another, with an apparently jaunty tax specialist. Ahead of me in the
queue, he bought only his own cappuccino and cake, leaving me to get
mine, and then for 20 minutes I heard all about the many, many times
he’d seen U2, related one concert at a time. By then my cup was empty.
In all sorts of ways, my cup seemed to be empty.
Most of the encounters so far, on screen and in life, have
been like this. Some have been worse, though one was a success so
tremendous (a restaurant that turned into dancing, a walk by the river
and a glorious snog) that I couldn’t sleep, imagining our life together,
a fantasy outcome put to an end when he cut me dead.
Talking people into being interested in you before meeting –
that’s where you might expect the internet to excel. That could work in
a middle-aged woman’s favour, circumventing the evident shock of her in
person. As Jack keeps telling me, men are visual creatures. He’s
doubtful about the Scheherazade strategy, one involving telling stories
and general email and phone-based bewitchment. Nonetheless, I’m sticking
with plan A. I’m going to be quirky and bright, and a little bit alpha.
Mostly, I’m going to continue to be 50; shortly 51. I’m hopeful of
finding someone eventually. I’m just hoping it won’t take 1,001 nights.
How many problems does Beyonce have, you wonder? Well, turns out, it’s the same number as her husband—99, natch—but one thing that is not a problem? Her ass. Got it? Good.
Beyonce.com
Bey shared a photo on her website
where she’s wearing a gray bodysuit with the words “99 Problems But My
Ass Ain’t One” emblazoned across the front. Well, the bodysuit was
*originally* a shirt dress, so it looks like custom clothing alteration
is also not a problem for B—good joke, right???
The Laundry Room
The 99 Problems Shirt Dress is $128
on The Laundry Room, but, LBR, who knows how much longer it’ll last now
that it has Beyonce’s seal of approval. While the original appears
looser and, y’know, more dress-like, it would appear Bey decided to show
off her non-problem in a tighter and higher-cut silhouette. Lemme show
you how much of a non-problem this thing is, you know what I mean???
Whether you copy her lead or decide to wear the dress in its original
form is up to you, but either way, you better act fast because this
thing is sure to sell out.
Having seconds this Thanksgiving? Try these tech-fueled fitness tips first.
Once
upon a time, mashed potatoes were stick-to-your-ribs food. Nowadays,
they just pile on your waist. Still, come Turkey Day, there’s no way
you’ll be able to resist an extra helping, and with today’s fitness
trackers, you won’t have to.Helping
people to quantify their activity and catalog their calories, the
latest smart health gear doesn’t just serve up heaping spoonfuls of
data, they also give you new inspiring ways to get healthy. Catapult
from the couch to the gym — after your post Thanksgiving dinner nap, of
course — with these six gadget-driven fitness tricks:
Stop Sucking Wind
If you’ve ever laced up and hit the pavement only to suck wind — hard — Adidas Fit Smart
will help you to slow down and build your respiratory and cardio skills
back up gradually. Using a color-based heart rate display that shows
users how hard they’re exerting themselves (blue is resting, green is
active, orange and red are pushing it), the $199 wristwatch also syncs
with expertly organized fitness plans via Adidas’s MiCoach system.
Of course, when it comes to fitness trackers, people tend
to overlook Adidas, but through MiCoach, they have been in the game
longer than almost anyone, and their platform is full of training
regimens for runners whether they are just aspirational or already
highly competitive.
Comfort is Key
The biggest problem for people who use fitness trackers is
finding the motivation to wear one all the time. Sure, the bigger the
gadget (and the more of them) the better the data, but sometimes having
the freedom to move is all about feeling free when you actually do move.
Women, burdened with chest-strangling sports bras, have it worse than
men — unless they don a Sensoria Fitness Sports Bra.
This $149 combination heart-rate monitor and support
garment embeds textile sensors into its light, moisture-wicking fabric.
The no-fuss sensor is a natural fit on the chest, and with low-energy
Bluetooth technology connecting it to your smartphone, it will last up
to eight months before the battery needs to be replaced. In addition,
the heart rate monitor is compatible with Strava, Runkeeper, and
MapMyRun, top fitness-tracking apps for your smartphone.
Get Fighter Pilot Fit
Exercise can feel like drudgery, but instead of thinking
of yourself as a slob, imagine yourself as an elite athlete — after all,
that’s how athletic companies think of you. For instance, Nike may have
developed sneakers for Michael Jordan, but they made a lot more money
selling them to aspiring ballers like yourself. So next time you suit
up, give yourself some credit. Lifebeam Hatactually
packs technology that has helped track fighter pilots’ vitals
mid-flight. A lightweight, breathable $99 running hat, it has sensors
that measure heart rate, steps, and calories burned, sending this data
along to ANT+ equipped devices or to smartphones via an embedded,
low-energy Bluetooth chip. And if you’d rather ride than run, Lifebeam
has a bicycle helmet version, too.
Watch Your Waist, Not Your Wallet
Gym memberships are only guaranteed to make your wallet
slimmer, and they could fail at helping you lose weight. And though
expensive, touchscreen, heart rate-monitoring trackers are currently all
the rage, they also offer that same empty promise. Meanwhile,
inexpensive activity monitors like the Misfit Flashtake much less investment and can offer the same immense upside.
Discrete, waterproof, and versatile, the
$49-for-pre-order, disc-shaped device can be worn on the wrist, belt, or
even around the neck to monitor steps, calories burned, distance
covered, and sleep quality. It’s always on and has a battery that lasts
up to six months, syncing to your smartphone via low energy Bluetooth.
But at that low a price, Flash lacks something that other, more
expensive trackers bring to the table — the guilt over how much you
spent on it.
Listen to Your Heart
According to a 2014 study by the National Strength and Conditioning Association,
music can help joggers shut out the world, run faster, bounce back more
quickly, and heck, even enjoy themselves more. It’s all very technical,
but then again you probably knew all that already — because who doesn’t
enjoy working out to their favorite jams? If you want to recreate the
science for yourself, pop on the LG Heart Rate Monitor Earphone.
As the name implies, the $179 headphones can catch your pulse while
pumping out your favorite music, beaming everything back and forth to
your smartphone via Bluetooth. In addition, with a workout voice guide
and a playback control remote, you can skip all the mellow stuff when it
tells you how slow you’re going, and crank up the volume on your power
tracks to give yourself — and your research — a little extra kick.
Make Fitness An Always-On Activity
If you haven’t said it yourself already, be assured that
experts are screaming it from the rooftops: desk jobs are killing us.
Whether it’s doing laps around the office or taking walks around the
neighborhood, everyone needs to insert some more movement into their day
and to make fitness an ongoing effort. The discrete and comfortable Garmin VivoSmart
can keep you moving by counting steps, measuring other health metrics
like heart rate and calories burned and helping you reach your daily
goals. Like smartwatches, the slim, $169 band has an OLED display that
can display notifications from your Bluetooth-synced smartphone, letting
you see everything from who’s calling to the content of your text
messages. But most importantly, it gives you periodic reminders to get
up and stretch your legs, even vibrating on your wrist to jostle you out
of your seat.
The TP-Link TL-WDR3600 is your best low-budget option.
This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a list of the best technology to buy. Read the original full article below at TheWirecutter.com.
If I wanted the cheapest good Wi-Fi router I could get, I would buy the TP-Link TL-WDR3600.
It’s a wireless-N router that costs $60 but outperforms some routers
that cost twice as much. It took more than 150 hours of research and
testing to find our pick. Of the 29 routers we looked at and the seven
we tested, the TL-WDR3600 had the best performance for the lowest price.
Our Pick
The TP-Link TL-WDR3600 is a dual-band, two-stream
router that’s faster, more consistent, and has better range than other
routers near its price range. Unlike many cheap routers, it supports
both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, and it has Gigabit Ethernet ports and two
USB 2.0 ports for sharing printers and storage with your network. It’s a
great upgrade from your ISP-provided router, and it supports a
connection type that’s six times as fast as wireless-g (the previous
standard found in routers from 2007 or earlier).
Since the TL-WDR3600 is a wireless-N router, wireless-AC devices
won’t be as fast as they could be on a wireless-AC router. We don’t
think that’s a dealbreaker yet. Wireless-AC only started showing up in
high-end laptops, smartphones, and tablets in 2013. Wireless-N devices
are still much more common. Wireless-AC devices work just fine with a
wireless-N router, though. In our tests, the TL-WDR3600 even
outperformed some more expensive wireless-AC routers at long range.
The TL-WDR3600 is easy to set up, but beyond that its user interface
is complex and unintuitive. This is a common problem with TP-Link
routers, but we think this router’s performance and low price make it
worth the hassle. At this price, performance is more important than an
interface with which you’ll rarely have to deal. And if you can manage
the interface, you’ll find features common in more expensive routers,
like parental controls, guest networks, and a DLNA server for streaming
media.
Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree. That’s hardly shocking. But what’s interesting is there’s a way to fix this that doesn’t involve exercise or being deprived of your favorite foods.
No, this is not some silly pitch for low carb, low fat, Crossfit or
the magical supplement of the week. Actually, it’s about psychology.
Brian Wansink is a Cornell researcher who studies how we eat. He was
appointed by the White House to head up changes to US Dietary
Guidelines.
He’s also the author of two fascinating books: Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think Slim by Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life
In the course of his research, Brian realized something pretty interesting:we eat for lots of reasons — but usually not because of hunger.
Via Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think:
Everyone — every single one of us — eats how much we eat
largely because of what’s around us. We overeat not because of hunger
but because of family and friends, packages and plates, names and
numbers, labels and lights, colors and candles, shapes and smells,
distractions and distances, cupboards and containers. This list is
almost as endless as it’s invisible.
We are slaves to context. We eat because friends are around, because something’s free, because it’s in reach, because things are tasty, etc.
We respond to “food cues” over feelings. What we see is usually more
important than what we actually eat. And Wansink wanted to prove this.
One of the things that makes his research so clever is that he’s sneaky.
(If you have the choice of trusting what a used car salesman says or
what a psychology researcher tells you before a study, go with the car
salesman.)
Wansink rigged bowls to be “bottomless.” A hidden tube made sure that
no matter how much soup a subject ate, the bowl would not empty.
Then he fed people. What happened? People with normal bowls ate 15 ounces. Some with the rigged bowls more than a quart.
People of my generation slid into employment with ease. But do I have
the right attitude to personal development to pass today’s supermarket
application test?
Sandwich firms
look outside the UK for workers because ‘making a sandwich is much
harder work than selling one’. Photograph: Monkey Business Images/Rex
The British labour market is a puzzle. On the one hand, it’s a low-wage economy that needs to import sandwich-makers from Hungary because nobody in Northamptonshire wants the job.
On the other, to work in a shop that sells the selfsame sandwiches, the
jobseeker needs to pass an exam that might give pause to a fellow of All Souls.
Two young people who share my house recently applied to be assistants
at a supermarket chain; if I insert the adjective “fashionable” before
the last two words, there will be little mystery as to its identity. The
days when grocers stuck notices in their windows – “smart boy wanted” –
have, of course, vanished with the trolley bus, the lead model soldier
and the liquorice pipe. Applications need to be made online through a
three-stage test. Failure at any of the stages means rejection. “The
more honest you are, the more informed our decision can be as to whether
or not you would enjoy life here, working for us,” says the
supermarket. But honesty is a risky policy. Better for the employer,
probably. But better for the candidate who badly wants a job? It’s the
story of interviews down the ages: which of us is immune to the
temptation of telling the employer what we think they want to hear?
First we have to understand the question. I tried applying for an
assistant’s job at one of the supermarket’s London petrol stations. An
early question wondered about my approach to personal development. Which
of the following statements best described it?
“1. I am happy to complete the learning and development opportunities
that my manager suggests to me in order to do well in my role.
2. I focus on learning and development opportunities that are
directly relevant to my role, in order to become as good as I can at my
job.
3. I take every opportunity possible to develop in my role in order to give my best performance.”
The first looks to me the most passive – or realistic – of these
choices, and the third the eagerest, beaverest. But these are fine
gradations, and as someone who has earned a lot of his livelihood trying
to clarify text, I can’t see much difference between 2 and 3. The next
question asked about the kind of organisation I would like to work for.
Would it be “efficient and hierarchical, where decisions … are made and
progressed quickly?” Would it be one “where everyone is consulted about
the majority of decisions, even if this means decisions take a long time
to progress?” Would it be “a flexible but relaxed organisation, where
employees can take responsibility … but decisions are not always
followed through?” The last two sound both desirable and ill-fated. It
would have to be the first: “progressed quickly” carries the employer’s
note of approval.
Awaiting me at the end of this rigorous and high-flown process,
supposing I got through all 60 questions and the interview, was a
position on the nightshift, 10pm to 6am, serving petrol in Ealing for
£7.42 an hour – say £15,500 a year for someone who knows what
“hierarchical” means and has previous experience working in a
“fast-paced customer-service environment”, and is prepared to sleep
through most of winter’s precious daylight. That’s £15,500 a year in a city where £100,000 is said to be the least you need to afford a mortgage on the average dwelling.
True, some of the 300 workers that Greencore, the UK’s biggestsandwich-maker, wants to hire from Hungary will be earning even less:
one in 10 will be paid the minimum wage, £6.50 an hour, or £1,127 a
month for a 40-hour week – compared to £260 a month, the minimum wage in
Hungary. But Northamptonshire is a far cheaper place to live than
London. In terms of what his or her wages will buy, the Ealing pump
attendant probably has the worse deal.
Why, then, does the sandwich-maker need to go searching for labour in
Hungary when the supermarket has such a plenitude of British applicants
that it can sieve them like an Oxbridge college? Because of an
inescapable fact: making a sandwich is much harder work than selling one
– more taxing physically, less esteemed, less visible and infinitely
more monotonous. A fairer society would reward the maker much more than
the seller, just as the miner was, by the 1950s, paid much more than the
coalman. Until it does, which is to say until supermarket and supplier
set a higher price for their sandwiches, or the two firms decide to take
less in profit, the hands that spread the tuna with the mayo and the
chicken with the sweetcorn will increasingly be hired abroad.
❦
I failed the test. Waitrose didn’t want me for the nightshift. As for
our young house-sharers, one failed at the second stage, while the
other got to stage three and is still waiting to hear. None of this is a
disaster, but the ease and inevitability with which my generation
slipped into paid employment now seems miraculous. As a fairly aimless
17-year-old, I answered an advert for a job in the library of our
nearest town. The next morning, a small man in a blue uniform knocked on
our door to ask if I would come immediately for an interview – he was
Mr S, one of the janitors, and he’d travelled six miles by bus. I went
with him to meet the librarian, Miss R, who sat grandly in her office
beside a sparkling coal fire. I was hired and the next day met my
colleagues, who were nearly all women, apart from the two janitors, Mr T
as well as Mr S, both nearing retirement age and in their uniforms
looking like figures popping out from behind the doors of an ornamental
clock.
Work was secure. I suspect nobody had been sacked from the library
since Andrew Carnegie founded it. Every morning we arranged the fiction
alphabetically and the non-fiction according to Dewey’s decimal system.
We stamped books with due dates; Miss R, read the TLS by the fire and
ordered more; occasionally, Mr S or Mr T would go to a house with a
“notifiable disease” and put the books there in the incinerator. Nobody
suggested that I took “every opportunity possible to develop in my
role”. It was only a job, for heaven’s sake. Between five and six every
evening we would hear the rush to and from the bus station on the street
outside, as workers from the mills and offices went to catch the buses
that had just been emptied by workers from the dockyard. So many jobs;
it made the first one easy to leave.
