Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 55. Sunrise is 6:58 and sunset 6:26 PM for 11h 28m 28s of daytime. The moon is in its third quarter with 49.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1995, the first planet orbiting another sun, 51 Pegasi b, is discovered.
Talmon Joseph Smith reports The U.S. added 336,000 jobs in September:
In a sign of continued economic stamina, payrolls grew by 336,000 on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department said on Friday. The increase, almost double economists’ expectations, serves as a confirmation of the labor market’s vitality and the overall hardiness of an economy facing challenges from a variety of forces.
The unemployment rate was 3.8 percent, unchanged from August, as joblessness ticked back near record lows.
September was the 33rd consecutive month of job growth. Hiring figures for July and August were revised upward, with employers adding 119,000 more jobs to the labor market than previously recorded. But wage gains were cooler than expected, with average hourly earnings rising 0.2 percent from the previous month and 4.2 percent from September 2022.
Federal Reserve policymakers have tried to rein in both wages and prices by pulling up interest rates. Some financial analysts believe that continued resilience in wage gains and job growth could hasten a downturn by prompting the Fed to raise borrowing costs further during its next meeting in early November.
The unemployment rate has been below 4 percent since December 2021, a stretch not achieved since the late 1960s.
“This is an economy on fire,” said Samuel Rines, an economist and the managing director of Corbu, a financial research firm.
There’s a local aspect to these national gains: Will Whitewater continue on a new course, and enjoy some of these national gains, or will she fall back into the old stagnation of those long-time politicians, special interests, operatives, and catspaws who have time and again left Whitewater behind the national pace? Whitewater’s residents are as capable as any in America, yet Whitewater historically has not kept pace with it’s share of national successes.
Residents of Whitewater deserve as much as anyone in America, and would have more than they now have, if the serial failures and excuses over all these many years had not left the city with less. See Whitewater’s Still Waiting for That Boom (about the time in 2020 just before the pandemic).
What’s in the Night Sky October 2023: