Replies to post #80849 on Coffee Sipping Big Board Stocks

[EZ2]

Friggin' freezing here today ---- HIGH is only going to 50* !


Have a good one ---- enjoy your FREE time! <vbg>

[EZ2]

LMAO ~~~ like we didn't know it was coming for 65+ years!!! ;-)

Aging workforce strains Social Security, Medicare

Apr 23, 3:52 AM (ET)

By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER


WASHINGTON (AP) - An aging population and an economy that has been slow to rebound are straining the long-term finances of Social Security and Medicare, the government's two largest benefit programs.

Those problems are getting new attention Monday as the trustees who oversee the massive programs release their annual financial reports.

Medicare is in worse shape than Social Security because of rising health care costs. But both programs are on a path to become insolvent in the coming decades, unless Congress acts, according to the trustees.

Last year, the trustees projected the Medicare hospital insurance fund for seniors would run out of money in 2024. Social Security's retirement fund was projected to run dry in 2038, while the disability fund was projected to be drained by 2018.

New projections in March gave a more dire assessment of the disability program, which has seen a spike in applications as more disabled workers lose jobs and apply for benefits.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the disability fund would run out of money in 2016. Social Security's trustees are again urging Congress to shore up the disability system by reallocating money from the retirement program, just as lawmakers did in 1994.

If the Social Security and Medicare funds ever become exhausted, both programs would collect only enough money in payroll taxes to pay partial benefits, the trustees said.

"I don't know how to make it clear to the public, but in my mind the sirens are going off," said Mary Johnson, policy analyst for the Senior Citizens League. "I wouldn't say we're under attack, but we are in a very, very serious position."

Don't expect the finances to look much better, if at all, in the new report. Tax revenues have started to rebound but they are still below pre-recession levels. Also, this year's cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, was much higher than the trustees projected it would be.

Last spring, the trustee's projected that Social Security recipients would get a benefit increase of 0.7 percent for this year, but higher-than-expected inflation pushed it to 3.6 percent. That was good news for seniors but it drained more resources from the system.

More than 56 million retirees, disabled workers, spouses and children receive Social Security. The average retirement benefit is $1,232 a month; the average monthly benefit for disabled workers is $1,111.

About 50 million people are covered by Medicare, the medical insurance program for older Americans.

One bright spot for Medicare is that the pace of cost increases has eased somewhat, even as baby boomers are turning 65 at the rate of 10,000 a day and becoming eligible for the program. So instead of speeding toward a budget cliff, Medicare is merely steering toward insolvency.

"The trends in Medicare are more modest than the cost increases we have seen in the private commercial sector," said economist David Blitzer, who oversees Standard & Poor's index of health care costs. "But both Medicare and the commercial sector face rising cost pressures no matter what, and they seem to come from virtually all directions."

Because Medicare is a government program, it sets prices on take-it-or-leave-it terms for hospitals and doctors, who complain it doesn't pay enough and that causes them to charge more to privately insured patients.

Many experts say the longer Congress waits to address the two programs, the more difficult it could become to impose adequate changes. If Congress acts soon, it can phase in changes over time, perhaps sparing current retirees while giving those closing in on retirement time to prepare.

But Washington has struggled to make tough political choices that could involve raising taxes, cutting benefits or some combination of both.

Advocates for seniors oppose benefit cuts in either program. They say Social Security's finances are secure for decades to come.

"No one is saying you don't have to maintain it," said Eric Kingson, co-chair of the Strengthen Social Security Campaign and a professor of social work at Syracuse University. "What I worry about is reducing he benefit structure or radically changing the system."

Kingson and other advocates say Social Security could be shored up by simply increasing the amount of wages subject to Social Security taxes - an idea that most Republicans in Congress flatly oppose.

Social Security is financed by a 6.2 percent tax on the first $110,100 in wages. It is paid by both employers and workers. Congress temporarily reduced the tax on workers to 4.2 percent for 2011 and 2012, though the program's finances are being made whole through increased government borrowing.

The Medicare tax rate is 1.45 percent on all wages, paid by both employees and workers.

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Associated Press writer Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar contributed to this report.

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Online:

2011 reports: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/index.html

[EZ2]

"The brain is a terrible thing to waste"! ~~~ but, then again, maybe spending THOUSANDS of DOLLARS on over-education is too!!!!


1 in 2 new graduates are jobless or underemployed

Apr 22, 5:19 PM (ET)

By HOPE YEN

(AP) In this photo taken Thursday, April 19, 2012, barista Michael Bledsoe smiles as he chats with a...
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WASHINGTON (AP) - The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.

A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don't fully use their skills and knowledge.

Young adults with bachelor's degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs - waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example - and that's confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.

An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor's degrees.


(AP) In this photo taken Thursday, April 19, 2012, Kelman Edwards Jr., working out at an apartment...
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Opportunities for college graduates vary widely.

While there's strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor's degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.

Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor's degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.

"I don't even know what I'm looking for," says Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.

Initially hopeful that his college education would create opportunities, Bledsoe languished for three months before finally taking a job as a barista, a position he has held for the last two years. In the beginning he sent three or four resumes day. But, Bledsoe said, employers questioned his lack of experience or the practical worth of his major. Now he sends a resume once every two weeks or so.


(AP) In this photo taken Thursday, April 19, 2012, barista Michael Bledsoe prepares a two-shot coffee...
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Bledsoe, currently making just above minimum wage, says he got financial help from his parents to help pay off student loans. He is now mulling whether to go to graduate school, seeing few other options to advance his career. "There is not much out there, it seems," he said.

His situation highlights a widening but little-discussed labor problem. Perhaps more than ever, the choices that young adults make earlier in life - level of schooling, academic field and training, where to attend college, how to pay for it - are having long-lasting financial impact.

"You can make more money on average if you go to college, but it's not true for everybody," says Harvard economist Richard Freeman, noting the growing risk of a debt bubble with total U.S. student loan debt surpassing $1 trillion. "If you're not sure what you're going to be doing, it probably bodes well to take some job, if you can get one, and get a sense first of what you want from college."

Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University who analyzed the numbers, said many people with a bachelor's degree face a double whammy of rising tuition and poor job outcomes. "Simply put, we're failing kids coming out of college," he said, emphasizing that when it comes to jobs, a college major can make all the difference. "We're going to need a lot better job growth and connections to the labor market, otherwise college debt will grow."

By region, the Mountain West was most likely to have young college graduates jobless or underemployed - roughly 3 in 5. It was followed by the more rural southeastern U.S., including Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Pacific region, including Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington, also was high on the list.


(AP) In this photo taken Thursday, April 19, 2012, Kelman Edwards Jr. works on his laptop in an...
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On the other end of the scale, the southern U.S., anchored by Texas, was most likely to have young college graduates in higher-skill jobs.

The figures are based on an analysis of 2011 Current Population Survey data by Northeastern University researchers and supplemented with material from Paul Harrington, an economist at Drexel University, and the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. They rely on Labor Department assessments of the level of education required to do the job in 900-plus U.S. occupations, which were used to calculate the shares of young adults with bachelor's degrees who were "underemployed."

About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.

Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year.

Broken down by occupation, young college graduates were heavily represented in jobs that require a high school diploma or less.


(AP) In this photo taken Thursday, April 19, 2012, barista Michael Bledsoe adds to his tip jar after...
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In the last year, they were more likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined (100,000 versus 90,000). There were more working in office-related jobs such as receptionist or payroll clerk than in all computer professional jobs (163,000 versus 100,000). More also were employed as cashiers, retail clerks and customer representatives than engineers (125,000 versus 80,000).

According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor's degree or higher to fill the position - teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren't easily replaced by computers.

College graduates who majored in zoology, anthropology, philosophy, art history and humanities were among the least likely to find jobs appropriate to their education level; those with nursing, teaching, accounting or computer science degrees were among the most likely.

In Nevada, where unemployment is the highest in the nation, Class of 2012 college seniors recently expressed feelings ranging from anxiety and fear to cautious optimism about what lies ahead.

With the state's economy languishing in an extended housing bust, a lot of young graduates have shown up at job placement centers in tears. Many have been squeezed out of jobs by more experienced workers, job counselors said, and are now having to explain to prospective employers the time gaps in their resumes.

"It's kind of scary," said Cameron Bawden, 22, who is graduating from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas in December with a business degree. His family has warned him for years about the job market, so he has been building his resume by working part time on the Las Vegas Strip as a food runner and doing a marketing internship with a local airline.

Bawden said his friends who have graduated are either unemployed or working along the Vegas Strip in service jobs that don't require degrees. "There are so few jobs and it's a small city," he said. "It's all about who you know."

Any job gains are going mostly to workers at the top and bottom of the wage scale, at the expense of middle-income jobs commonly held by bachelor's degree holders. By some studies, up to 95 percent of positions lost during the economic recovery occurred in middle-income occupations such as bank tellers, the type of job not expected to return in a more high-tech age.

David Neumark, an economist at the University of California-Irvine, said a bachelor's degree can have benefits that aren't fully reflected in the government's labor data. He said even for lower-skilled jobs such as waitress or cashier, employers tend to value bachelor's degree-holders more highly than high-school graduates, paying them more for the same work and offering promotions.

In addition, U.S. workers increasingly may need to consider their position in a global economy, where they must compete with educated foreign-born residents for jobs. Longer-term government projections also may fail to consider "degree inflation," a growing ubiquity of bachelor's degrees that could make them more commonplace in lower-wage jobs but inadequate for higher-wage ones.

That future may be now for Kelman Edwards Jr., 24, of Murfreesboro, Tenn., who is waiting to see the returns on his college education.

After earning a biology degree last May, the only job he could find was as a construction worker for five months before he quit to focus on finding a job in his academic field. He applied for positions in laboratories but was told they were looking for people with specialized certifications.

"I thought that me having a biology degree was a gold ticket for me getting into places, but every other job wants you to have previous history in the field," he said. Edwards, who has about $5,500 in student debt, recently met with a career counselor at Middle Tennessee State University. The counselor's main advice: Pursue further education.

"Everyone is always telling you, 'Go to college,'" Edwards said. "But when you graduate, it's kind of an empty cliff."

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Associated Press writers Manuel Valdes in Seattle; Travis Loller in Nashville, Tenn.; Cristina Silva in Las Vegas; and Sandra Chereb in Carson City, Nev., contributed to this report.

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Hundreds of thousands may lose Internet in July

Apr 20, 6:24 PM (ET)

LOLITA C. BALDOR

(AP) This undated handout image provided by The DNS Changer Working Group (DCWG) shows the webpage. It...
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WASHINGTON (AP) - For computer users, a few mouse clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing Internet connections this summer.

Unknown to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world. In a highly unusual response, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected users. But that system is to be shut down.

The FBI is encouraging users to visit a website run by its security partner, , that will inform them whether they're infected and explain how to fix the problem. After July 9, infected users won't be able to connect to the Internet.http://www.dcwg.org

Most victims don't even know their computers have been infected, although the malicious software probably has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.

Last November, the FBI and other authorities were preparing to take down a hacker ring that had been running an Internet ad scam on a massive network of infected computers.

"We started to realize that we might have a little bit of a problem on our hands because ... if we just pulled the plug on their criminal infrastructure and threw everybody in jail, the victims of this were going to be without Internet service," said Tom Grasso, an FBI supervisory special agent. "The average user would open up Internet Explorer and get 'page not found' and think the Internet is broken."

On the night of the arrests, the agency brought in Paul Vixie, chairman and founder of Internet Systems Consortium, to install two Internet servers to take the place of the truckload of impounded rogue servers that infected computers were using. Federal officials planned to keep their servers online until March, giving everyone opportunity to clean their computers. But it wasn't enough time. A federal judge in New York extended the deadline until July.

Now, said Grasso, "the full court press is on to get people to address this problem." And it's up to computer users to check their PCs.

This is what happened:

Hackers infected a network of probably more than 570,000 computers worldwide. They took advantage of vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating system to install malicious software on the victim computers. This turned off antivirus updates and changed the way the computers reconcile website addresses behind the scenes on the Internet's domain name system.

The DNS system is a network of servers that translates a web address - such as - into the numerical addresses that computers use. Victim computers were reprogrammed to use rogue DNS servers owned by the attackers. This allowed the attackers to redirect computers to fraudulent versions of any website.www.ap.org

The hackers earned profits from advertisements that appeared on websites that victims were tricked into visiting. The scam netted the hackers at least $14 million, according to the FBI. It also made thousands of computers reliant on the rogue servers for their Internet browsing.

When the FBI and others arrested six Estonians last November, the agency replaced the rogue servers with Vixie's clean ones. Installing and running the two substitute servers for eight months is costing the federal government about $87,000.

The number of victims is hard to pinpoint, but the FBI believes that on the day of the arrests, at least 568,000 unique Internet addresses were using the rogue servers. Five months later, FBI estimates that the number is down to at least 360,000. The U.S. has the most, about 85,000, federal authorities said. Other countries with more than 20,000 each include Italy, India, England and Germany. Smaller numbers are online in Spain, France, Canada, China and Mexico.

Vixie said most of the victims are probably individual home users, rather than corporations that have technology staffs who routinely check the computers.

FBI officials said they organized an unusual system to avoid any appearance of government intrusion into the Internet or private computers. And while this is the first time the FBI used it, it won't be the last.

"This is the future of what we will be doing," said Eric Strom, a unit chief in the FBI's Cyber Division. "Until there is a change in legal system, both inside and outside the United States, to get up to speed with the cyber problem, we will have to go down these paths, trail-blazing if you will, on these types of investigations."

Now, he said, every time the agency gets near the end of a cyber case, "we get to the point where we say, how are we going to do this, how are we going to clean the system" without creating a bigger mess than before.

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Online:

To check and clean computers: http://www.dcwg.org

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Lolita C. Baldor can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lbaldor

http://apnews.myway.com//article/20120420/D9U8U4AG1.html

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"The biggest challenge we have faced in marketing MyMedicalRecords is the resistance of people to change and begin the inevitable process of managing their personal health records online. This is also true of healthcare professionals, who tend to be conservative," said MMRGlobal (MMRF:$0.022,0$-0.0009,-3.93%) Chairman and CEO Bob Lorsch. "We have spent the past three months taking a hard look at our sales, marketing and distribution strategies and recalibrating our targets so we are now shifting our emphasis from just touching potential users through employee benefits and insurance programs to aggressively building a critical mass of active PHR users. So beyond the doctor's office, our consumer-controlled PHR is being deployed through interactive distribution channels that can directly place the product into users' hands, reinforce the need to have a PHR, and also assist users in adopting the PHR. It is our experience that once consumers start to use their accounts, they continue to use them and remain paid subscribers."

"We are investing the marketing dollars that will begin to launch these programs over the next two quarters, which is expected to give us a measurable uptick in Q3 and then beyond from PHR user subscriptions. For example, there are more than 20,000 independent pharmacies in the U.S. that fill approximately 1.5 billion prescriptions annually. Simply adding an individual's or family's prescriptions in a MyMedicalRecords PHR should generate significant usage of PHRs," Lorsch added.

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=74710382

[EZ2]

Not sure what all you are holding in the way of "divvy paying" trusts ---- but, if any are involved in NatGas holdings --- watch them close!!!

Good portion of IL that I read this morning indicated that many of them may be under some real pressure --- which will result in lowered/suspended dividend payments!


Just an FWIW!