vineri, 5 iunie 2015

Nightlife travel, Vines and other interests to follow

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Nightlife travel

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Should I Use Relative or Absolute URLs? - Whiteboard Friday - Moz Blog

Should I Use Relative or Absolute URLs? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by RuthBurrReedy

It was once commonplace for developers to code relative URLs into a site. There are a number of reasons why that might not be the best idea for SEO, and in today's Whiteboard Friday, Ruth Burr Reedy is here to tell you all about why.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard. Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!

Let's discuss some non-philosophical absolutes and relatives

Howdy, Moz fans. My name is Ruth Burr Reedy. You may recognize me from such projects as when I used to be the Head of SEO at Moz. I'm now the Senior SEO Manager at BigWing Interactive in Oklahoma City. Today we're going to talk about relative versus absolute URLs and why they are important.

At any given time, your website can have several different configurations that might be causing duplicate content issues. You could have just a standard http://www.example.com. That's a pretty standard format for a website.

But the main sources that we see of domain level duplicate content are when the non-www.example.com does not redirect to the www or vice-versa, and when the HTTPS versions of your URLs are not forced to resolve to HTTP versions or, again, vice-versa. What this can mean is if all of these scenarios are true, if all four of these URLs resolve without being forced to resolve to a canonical version, you can, in essence, have four versions of your website out on the Internet. This may or may not be a problem.

It's not ideal for a couple of reasons. Number one, duplicate content is a problem because some people think that duplicate content is going to give you a penalty. Duplicate content is not going to get your website penalized in the same way that you might see a spammy link penalty from Penguin. There's no actual penalty involved. You won't be punished for having duplicate content.

The problem with duplicate content is that you're basically relying on Google to figure out what the real version of your website is. Google is seeing the URL from all four versions of your website. They're going to try to figure out which URL is the real URL and just rank that one. The problem with that is you're basically leaving that decision up to Google when it's something that you could take control of for yourself.

There are a couple of other reasons that we'll go into a little bit later for why duplicate content can be a problem. But in short, duplicate content is no good.

However, just having these URLs not resolve to each other may or may not be a huge problem. When it really becomes a serious issue is when that problem is combined with injudicious use of relative URLs in internal links. So let's talk a little bit about the difference between a relative URL and an absolute URL when it comes to internal linking.

With an absolute URL, you are putting the entire web address of the page that you are linking to in the link. You're putting your full domain, everything in the link, including /page. That's an absolute URL.

However, when coding a website, it's a fairly common web development practice to instead code internal links with what's called a relative URL. A relative URL is just /page. Basically what that does is it relies on your browser to understand, "Okay, this link is pointing to a page that's on the same domain that we're already on. I'm just going to assume that that is the case and go there."

There are a couple of really good reasons to code relative URLs

1) It is much easier and faster to code.

When you are a web developer and you're building a site and there thousands of pages, coding relative versus absolute URLs is a way to be more efficient. You'll see it happen a lot.

2) Staging environments

Another reason why you might see relative versus absolute URLs is some content management systems -- and SharePoint is a great example of this -- have a staging environment that's on its own domain. Instead of being example.com, it will be examplestaging.com. The entire website will basically be replicated on that staging domain. Having relative versus absolute URLs means that the same website can exist on staging and on production, or the live accessible version of your website, without having to go back in and recode all of those URLs. Again, it's more efficient for your web development team. Those are really perfectly valid reasons to do those things. So don't yell at your web dev team if they've coded relative URLS, because from their perspective it is a better solution.

Relative URLs will also cause your page to load slightly faster. However, in my experience, the SEO benefits of having absolute versus relative URLs in your website far outweigh the teeny-tiny bit longer that it will take the page to load. It's very negligible. If you have a really, really long page load time, there's going to be a whole boatload of things that you can change that will make a bigger difference than coding your URLs as relative versus absolute.

Page load time, in my opinion, not a concern here. However, it is something that your web dev team may bring up with you when you try to address with them the fact that, from an SEO perspective, coding your website with relative versus absolute URLs, especially in the nav, is not a good solution.

There are even better reasons to use absolute URLs

1) Scrapers

If you have all of your internal links as relative URLs, it would be very, very, very easy for a scraper to simply scrape your whole website and put it up on a new domain, and the whole website would just work. That sucks for you, and it's great for that scraper. But unless you are out there doing public services for scrapers, for some reason, that's probably not something that you want happening with your beautiful, hardworking, handcrafted website. That's one reason. There is a scraper risk.

2) Preventing duplicate content issues

But the other reason why it's very important to have absolute versus relative URLs is that it really mitigates the duplicate content risk that can be presented when you don't have all of these versions of your website resolving to one version. Google could potentially enter your site on any one of these four pages, which they're the same page to you. They're four different pages to Google. They're the same domain to you. They are four different domains to Google.

But they could enter your site, and if all of your URLs are relative, they can then crawl and index your entire domain using whatever format these are. Whereas if you have absolute links coded, even if Google enters your site on www. and that resolves, once they crawl to another page, that you've got coded without the www., all of that other internal link juice and all of the other pages on your website, Google is not going to assume that those live at the www. version. That really cuts down on different versions of each page of your website. If you have relative URLs throughout, you basically have four different websites if you haven't fixed this problem.

Again, it's not always a huge issue. Duplicate content, it's not ideal. However, Google has gotten pretty good at figuring out what the real version of your website is.

You do want to think about internal linking, when you're thinking about this. If you have basically four different versions of any URL that anybody could just copy and paste when they want to link to you or when they want to share something that you've built, you're diluting your internal links by four, which is not great. You basically would have to build four times as many links in order to get the same authority. So that's one reason.

3) Crawl Budget

The other reason why it's pretty important not to do is because of crawl budget. I'm going to point it out like this instead.

When we talk about crawl budget, basically what that is, is every time Google crawls your website, there is a finite depth that they will. There's a finite number of URLs that they will crawl and then they decide, "Okay, I'm done." That's based on a few different things. Your site authority is one of them. Your actual PageRank, not toolbar PageRank, but how good Google actually thinks your website is, is a big part of that. But also how complex your site is, how often it's updated, things like that are also going to contribute to how often and how deep Google is going to crawl your site.

It's important to remember when we think about crawl budget that, for Google, crawl budget cost actual dollars. One of Google's biggest expenditures as a company is the money and the bandwidth it takes to crawl and index the Web. All of that energy that's going into crawling and indexing the Web, that lives on servers. That bandwidth comes from servers, and that means that using bandwidth cost Google actual real dollars.

So Google is incentivized to crawl as efficiently as possible, because when they crawl inefficiently, it cost them money. If your site is not efficient to crawl, Google is going to save itself some money by crawling it less frequently and crawling to a fewer number of pages per crawl. That can mean that if you have a site that's updated frequently, your site may not be updating in the index as frequently as you're updating it. It may also mean that Google, while it's crawling and indexing, may be crawling and indexing a version of your website that isn't the version that you really want it to crawl and index.

So having four different versions of your website, all of which are completely crawlable to the last page, because you've got relative URLs and you haven't fixed this duplicate content problem, means that Google has to spend four times as much money in order to really crawl and understand your website. Over time they're going to do that less and less frequently, especially if you don't have a really high authority website. If you're a small website, if you're just starting out, if you've only got a medium number of inbound links, over time you're going to see your crawl rate and frequency impacted, and that's bad. We don't want that. We want Google to come back all the time, see all our pages. They're beautiful. Put them up in the index. Rank them well. That's what we want. So that's what we should do.

There are couple of ways to fix your relative versus absolute URLs problem

1) Fix what is happening on the server side of your website

You have to make sure that you are forcing all of these different versions of your domain to resolve to one version of your domain. For me, I'm pretty agnostic as to which version you pick. You should probably already have a pretty good idea of which version of your website is the real version, whether that's www, non-www, HTTPS, or HTTP. From my view, what's most important is that all four of these versions resolve to one version.

From an SEO standpoint, there is evidence to suggest and Google has certainly said that HTTPS is a little bit better than HTTP. From a URL length perspective, I like to not have the www. in there because it doesn't really do anything. It just makes your URLs four characters longer. If you don't know which one to pick, I would pick one this one HTTPS, no W's. But whichever one you pick, what's really most important is that all of them resolve to one version. You can do that on the server side, and that's usually pretty easy for your dev team to fix once you tell them that it needs to happen.

2) Fix your internal links

Great. So you fixed it on your server side. Now you need to fix your internal links, and you need to recode them for being relative to being absolute. This is something that your dev team is not going to want to do because it is time consuming and, from a web dev perspective, not that important. However, you should use resources like this Whiteboard Friday to explain to them, from an SEO perspective, both from the scraper risk and from a duplicate content standpoint, having those absolute URLs is a high priority and something that should get done.

You'll need to fix those, especially in your navigational elements. But once you've got your nav fixed, also pull out your database or run a Screaming Frog crawl or however you want to discover internal links that aren't part of your nav, and make sure you're updating those to be absolute as well.

Then you'll do some education with everybody who touches your website saying, "Hey, when you link internally, make sure you're using the absolute URL and make sure it's in our preferred format," because that's really going to give you the most bang for your buck per internal link. So do some education. Fix your internal links.

Sometimes your dev team going to say, "No, we can't do that. We're not going to recode the whole nav. It's not a good use of our time," and sometimes they are right. The dev team has more important things to do. That's okay.

3) Canonicalize it!

If you can't get your internal links fixed or if they're not going to get fixed anytime in the near future, a stopgap or a Band-Aid that you can kind of put on this problem is to canonicalize all of your pages. As you're changing your server to force all of these different versions of your domain to resolve to one, at the same time you should be implementing the canonical tag on all of the pages of your website to self-canonize. On every page, you have a canonical page tag saying, "This page right here that they were already on is the canonical version of this page. " Or if there's another page that's the canonical version, then obviously you point to that instead.

But having each page self-canonicalize will mitigate both the risk of duplicate content internally and some of the risk posed by scrappers, because when they scrape, if they are scraping your website and slapping it up somewhere else, those canonical tags will often stay in place, and that lets Google know this is not the real version of the website.

In conclusion, relative links, not as good. Absolute links, those are the way to go. Make sure that you're fixing these very common domain level duplicate content problems. If your dev team tries to tell you that they don't want to do this, just tell them I sent you. Thanks guys.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Your Daily SEO Fix: Week 3

Posted by Trevor-Klein

Welcome to the third installment of our short (< 2-minute) video tutorials that help you all get the most out of Moz's tools. Each tutorial is designed to solve a use case that we regularly hear about from Moz community members—a need or problem for which you all could use a solution.

If you missed the previous roundups, you can find 'em here:

Week 1: Reclaim links using Open Site Explorer, build links using Fresh Web Explorer, and find the best time to tweet using Followerwonk.
Week 2: Analyze SERPs using new MozBar features, boost your rankings through on-page optimization, check your anchor text using Open Site Explorer, do keyword research with OSE and the keyword difficulty tool, and discover keyword opportunities in Moz Analytics.

Today, we've got a brand-new roundup of the most recent videos:

How to Compare Link Metrics in Open Site Explorer
How to Find Tweet Topics with Followerwonk
How to Create Custom Reports in Moz Analytics
How to Use Spam Score to Identify High-Risk Links
How to Get Link Building Opportunities Delivered to Your Inbox

Hope you enjoy them!

Fix 1: How to Compare Link Metrics in Open Site Explorer

Not all links are created equal. In this Daily SEO Fix, Chiaryn shows you how to use Open Site Explorer to analyze and compare link metrics for up to five URLs to see which are strongest.

Fix 2: How to Find Tweet Topics with Followerwonk

Understanding what works best for your competitors on Twitter is a great place to start when forming your own Twitter strategy. In this fix, Ellie explains how to identify strong-performing tweets from your competitors and how to use those tweets to shape your own voice and plan.

Fix 3: How to Create Custom Reports in Moz Analytics

In this Daily SEO Fix, Kevin shows you how to create a custom report in Moz Analytics and schedule it to be delivered to your inbox on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Fix 4: How to Use Spam Score to Identify High-Risk Links

Almost every site has a few bad links pointing to it, but lots of highly risky links can have a negative impact on your search engine rankings. In this fix, Tori shows you how to use Moz's Spam Score metric to identify spammy links.

Fix 5: How to Get Link Building Opportunities Delivered to Your Inbox

Building high-quality links is one of the most important aspects of SEO. In this Daily SEO Fix, Erin shows you how to use Moz Analytics to set up a weekly custom report that will notify you of pages on the web that mention your site but do not include a link, so you can use this info to build more links.

Looking for more?

We've got more videos in the previous two weeks' round-ups!

Your Daily SEO Fix: Week 1

Your Daily SEO Fix: Week 2

Don't have a Pro subscription? No problem. Everything we cover in these Daily SEO Fix videos is available with a free 30-day trial.

Sounds good. Sign me up!

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Seth's Blog : Blah, blah, blah

Blah, blah, blah

Writing and speaking (essays, non-fiction, copywriting, direct interactions, speeches) can be easily sorted into two groups:

The expected

The unexpected

We don't remember what most people say when they greet us (at a party, or even a funeral) because it's banal. Most college essays, tweets and advertising copy fit right into this category. The prose we consume every day gets instantly processed, filed away and ignored.

The other kind of writing is super risky. It is the original, vulnerable work of the edges. This is the interaction that adds real value because it's not something we could have already guessed you were about to say.

The unexpected doesn't work because it's surprising. It works because it's valuable. Valuable because it brings new truth, because it says something we didn't already know.

Of course, expected writing is often important. We need to check the boxes, pay the toll, make it clear that we know how to act and speak and write in a situation like this one.

But unexpected writing isn't merely important, it's a miracle. If we already knew what we needed to hear from you, we wouldn't need you to say it.

[Here's a first step in moving from one to the other: Cross out every sentence that could have been written by someone else, every box check, every predictable reference. Now, insert yourself. Your truth and your version of what happens next.]

• Email to a friend •

joi, 4 iunie 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Lessons from Carolina: Paying People to Not Work is Losing Policy, Tax Cuts and Reforms do Work
Athens to Delay IMF Repayment; Greece Close to Approving Extended Servitude; Will Tsipras Survive?
Nonfarm Productivity Collapses Greater Than Expected 3.1%, Unit Labor Costs Rise 6.7%; Transitory Weakness?
Obama to Ask Secret Court to Revive Bulk Phone Collections; Illegal Dragnet Revived

Lessons from Carolina: Paying People to Not Work is Losing Policy, Tax Cuts and Reforms do Work

Posted: 04 Jun 2015 02:09 PM PDT

In 2013, North Carolina figured out paying people to not work is a losing policy.

N.C became the first state to reject "free" federal payments for extended unemployment benefits and reduce the weeks of benefits to 20 from 26. It also passed big tax cuts.

Huge Payoff

The result was phenomenal as reported by Stephen Moore, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation in the Wall Street Journal article: The Tax-Cut Payoff in Carolina.

Four years ago North Carolina's unemployment rate was above 10% and the state still bore the effects of its battering in the recession. Many rural towns faced jobless rates of more than 20%. But in 2013 a combination of the biggest tax-rate reductions in the state's history and a gutsy but controversial unemployment-insurance reform supercharged the state's economy and has even helped finance budget surpluses.

The tax cut slashed the state's top personal income-tax rate to 5.75%, near the regional average, from 7.75%, which had been the highest in the South. The corporate tax rate was cut to 5% from 6.9%. The estate tax was eliminated.

Next came the novel tough-love unemployment-insurance reforms. The state became the first in the nation to reject "free" federal payments for extended unemployment benefits and reduce the weeks of benefits to 20 from 26. The maximum weekly dollar amount of payments, $535, which had been among the highest in the nation, was trimmed to a maximum of $350 a week. As a result, tens of thousands of Carolinians left the unemployment rolls.

While these measures were passing the legislature, the state capital boiled over with rancorous political rallies, called Moral Mondays, designed to block the "cruel" GOP agenda. Rev. William Barber II, one of the protest organizers, lambasted Republicans for making the Tar Heel State a "crucible of extremism and injustice." The national media piled on with claims that the Republican agenda cut taxes for the rich while slashing benefits for the poor.

Then a funny thing happened. After a few months, the unemployment rate started to decline rapidly and job growth climbed. Not just a little. Nearly 200,000 jobs have been added since 2013 and the unemployment rate has fallen to 5.5% from 7.9%.

On the Tax Foundation index of business conditions, North Carolina has been catapulted to 16th from a dismal 44th since 2013.

The most recent news will make many other governors jealous. The state didn't take the extra federal benefits—which require repayments later to the feds—and it cut the weekly benefits. So the state government has been able to pay back $2.8 billion in unemployment-insurance money owed to the feds, and it now has a trust-fund surplus. This means it will be able to provide employers with at least $500 million in cuts from the state and federal unemployment tax on payroll over 18 months.

This comes at a time when other states are having to raise payroll taxes to pay off the loans for the rich benefits they doled out in the recession and its aftermath. The lesson: Handouts from the feds are never free.

An even bigger surprise—even to supporters—is the tax cut's impact on revenue. Even with lower rates, tax revenues are up about 6% this year according to the state budget office. On May 6, Gov. McCrory announced that the state has a budget surplus of $400 million while many other states are scrambling to fill gaps.

The story gets better. Because North Carolina built in a trigger mechanism that applies excess revenues to corporate-rate cuts, the business tax has fallen to 5% from 6.9%, and next year it drops to 4%.

Lesson for Illinois

Tax cuts, workers' comp reform, and other business-friendly measures are the way to growth.

Instead, Illinoisans suffer from high taxes, untenable pension promises, inane union work rules, and workers' comp rules that collectively drive businesses away.

Worker's Comp Reform Dies in Illinois Senate

Let's put a spotlight on the need for workers' comp reform and why it's important for businesses in Illinois.

On May 29 Workers' Comp Reform Defeated in Illinois Senate.

An amendment to SB 997 filed by Senate GOP Leader Christine Radogno would finally address Illinois' causation standard under our worker's compensation law. Currently, the workplace could be less than 1% the cause of a worker's injury yet the employer is on the hook for all costs. Under Governor Rauner's plan, the workplace would have to be the primary cause, or 50% at fault, for the employees' injury.

The owner of a trucking firm located near the Indiana border testified that his work comp costs are $325,000 higher in Illinois than Indiana. The owner of a steel fabricator said he would save $106,000 in work comp costs if he moved to Indiana. A site selector, who works with businesses who want to either move or expand, said due to our work comp costs Illinois is always being cut from the short list of places to look at.

Despite these compelling arguments, Democrat members of the Judiciary committee vote against the bill mostly citing their concerns about the process and lack of vetting of the legislation.

Why Illinois Job Growth Lags

High taxes, demand for still more taxes, and inane work rules cause Illinois businesses to flee the state when they can.

Job growth lags precisely because Illinois is a poor state in which to conduct business.

The Illinois Policy Institute, Governor Rauner, and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) want to address these issues.

Unfortunately, all reforms die in the same place: an Illinois legislature controlled by House leader Mike Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Athens to Delay IMF Repayment; Greece Close to Approving Extended Servitude; Will Tsipras Survive?

Posted: 04 Jun 2015 11:03 AM PDT

Lesson in How to Answer a Question

Christine Lagarde said earlier today that she was "confident" Greece would make tomorrow's payment to the IMF.

Also today, when Alexis Tsipras was asked by reporters whether the installment would be made, the Greek prime minister replied: "Don't worry about that."

That was not a "yes" he simply said "don't worry about that", a technical non-answer.

Athens to Delay Payment

Yet moments ago, the Financial Times reported Greece to Delay IMF Repayment as Tsipras Faces Backlash.

Greece has notified the International Monetary Fund that it will not make a scheduled €300m loan repayment on Friday after opposition to a bailout compromise with creditors erupted inside the governing party.

Following a rarely used procedure permitted under IMF rules, the Greek government intends to bundle all the payments it owes in June totalling €1.5bn and transfer it at the end of the month.

"This move is almost unprecedented and based on Tsipras's comments yesterday unexpected," said Mujtaba Rahman, head of European analysis at the Eurasia Group risk consultancy. "It unnecessarily raises the stakes and will further undermine the goodwill of Greece's creditors."

Ever since an emergency summit meeting of EU leaders hosted Monday in Berlin by Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, eurozone officials have been concerned that many of the terms in a compromise plan hammered out by Greece's warring creditors would be unacceptable to Syriza.

Some eurozone officials believe Mr Tsipras will be forced to move to elections if he accepts creditors terms, which includes demands that Athens make public-sector pension cuts of 1 per cent annually starting next year. The pension measures, demanded by the IMF but resisted by the European Commission, were one of Athens' most important "red lines" in negotiations.

In a sign of how fraught the political situation had become for Mr Tsipras, he was forced to put off an expected second round of talks in Brussels with Mr Juncker to address his parliament on Friday night.

Tsipras Cave-In

In spite of all rants by Alexis Tsipras about dignity and unreasonable demands, it now appears the Greek prime minister is willing to extend Greek servitude to the despised Troika.

In the wake of the reported cave-in, Greek Left Vents Fury at Creditors.

Leftists in Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras' party vented fury on Thursday at terms proposed by Greece's creditors for a last-ditch deal to stave off bankruptcy and European officials acknowledged that large gaps remain to be bridged.

Tsipras emerged from late-night talks with senior EU officials in Brussels saying a deal with international lenders was "within sight" and that Athens would make a crucial payment due to the International Monetary Fund on Friday.

But he rejected pension cuts and a tax rise on electricity that he said European and IMF creditors were demanding along with other conditions to win the release frozen loans and avert a default that could hit euro zone and world markets.

The lenders were demanding that Greece reduce spending on pensions by 1 percentage point of gross domestic product and raise a further 1 percent or 1.8 billion euros ($2 billion) by increasing value-added tax on products ranging from drugs to electricity, the sources told Reuters.

Dijsselbloem said the meeting that ended after midnight had narrowed down the remaining issues but differences were "still quite large" and Athens was expected to present alternatives to some of the lenders' proposals within days.

An EU source said Tsipras could return to Brussels for further talks as soon as late Friday night, possibly along with top IMF and ECB officials.

A Greek official said Tsipras would brief parliament on the state of the negotiations in Athens at 1500 GMT on Friday.

In one concession, the lenders were offering to unlock 10.9 billion euros in unused bank bailout funds that would enable Greece to cover its financial needs through July and August - more than the 7.2 billion euros left in the expiring bailout.

Key to the Deal

Assuming there is a deal, the last paragraph likely explains why. Unlocking €10.9 billion is actually a very huge concession by the creditors.

Of course, all it really does is give Greece enough money to pay them back. Add it to Greece's debt burden that it will need to pay back.

Even so, Greece will still need a third bailout package of at least €50 billion (See Third Greek Bailout? Another €53.8 Billion Needed?)

Greece already has an unsustainable overall debt load of €323 billion. But hey, let's go deeper in servitude to the tune of another €50-60 billion.

I really did not think it would play out with a third bailout, and it still might not.

A fresh deal means more debt servitude coupled with economic depression and higher taxes.

If such a deal is worked out, misery and despair in Greece still is not high enough. It will get there eventually, even if now is not the time. What can't be paid back, won't. The only question is timing.

Will Tsipras Survive?

Questions still abound. Will Tsipras call a vote of confidence? If So, will he survive the vote?

Pin the Blame

Is it possible this is nothing but a negotiating tactic by Tsipras hoping Syriza will turn down the deal, taking blame off him personally.

And should it play out that way, it's likely that was his "pin the blame" game all along.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Nonfarm Productivity Collapses Greater Than Expected 3.1%, Unit Labor Costs Rise 6.7%; Transitory Weakness?

Posted: 04 Jun 2015 09:42 AM PDT

Economists overestimated Q1 productivity and underestimated Q1 unit labor costs in spite of blaming the weather and the port strike as transitory weakness.

Let's take a look at Bloomberg Consensus Estimates for Productivity and Costs.

The grinding halt that the economy came to the first quarter pulled nonfarm productivity down by 3.1 percent and inflated unit labor costs by 6.7 percent. These are more severe than the initial data released a month ago where productivity was pegged at minus 1.9 percent and unit labor costs at plus 5.0 percent. Output as measured in this report fell 1.6 percent in the quarter at the same time that hours worked rose 1.6 percent. Adding to labor costs was a sharp 3.3 percent rise in compensation.

Looking year-on-year, productivity is on the plus side, though just barely, at 0.3 percent with labor costs more tame, at plus 1.8 percent. Should the second-quarter see the bounce as many suspect, productivity, compared to the first quarter, should improve and labor costs cool.

Productivity and Costs

Let's now turn our attention to the BLS Report on Productivity and Costs for Q1.

Nonfarm Productivity

Nonfarm business sector labor productivity decreased at a 3.1 percent annual rate during the first quarter of 2015, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today, as output declined 1.6 percent and hours worked increased 1.6 percent. (All quarterly percent changes in this release are seasonally adjusted annual rates.)
Unit labor costs in the nonfarm business sector increased 6.7 percent in the first quarter of 2 015, reflecting a 3.3 percent increase in hourly compensation and a 3.1 percent decline in productivity.

Manufacturing Productivity

Manufacturing sector labor productivity decreased 1.0 percent in the first quarter of 2015, as output decreased 1.1 percent and hours worked edged down 0.1 percent.
Productivity decreased 3.3 percent in the durable manufacturing sector and increased 1.5 percent in the nondurable goods sector.

Revisions

In the first quarter of 2015, nonfarm business productivity fell 3.1 percent, a greater decline than was reported in the preliminary estimate. The revised estimate reflects a 1.4 percentage point downward revision to output and a small downward revision to hours.
Unit labor costs were revised up as the result of a 1.2 percentage point downward revision to productivity and a 0.2 percentage point upward revision to hourly compensation.
In the manufacturing sector, productivity in the first quarter declined 1.0 percent, slightly less than the preliminary estimate. Unit labor costs increased 3.4 percent, rather than 2.7 percent as previously reported, due to a 0.9 percentage point upward revision to hourly compensation.

Transitory Weakness?

Output is lower, costs higher. This will hit bottom line profit margins.

Ben Bernanke says it's transitory. Christine Lagarde at the IMF sang the same tune today, likely confirming that it's not transitory.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Obama to Ask Secret Court to Revive Bulk Phone Collections; Illegal Dragnet Revived

Posted: 04 Jun 2015 12:21 AM PDT

Ink on the alleged Freedom Act is hardly dry, and the Obama Administration Will Ask Secret Court to Revive NSA Surveillance.

The Obama administration intends to use part of a law banning the bulk collection of US phone records to temporarily restart the bulk collection of US phone records.

US officials confirmed to the Guardian that in the coming days they will ask a secret surveillance court to revive the program – deemed illegal by a federal appeals court – all in the name of "transitioning" the domestic surveillance effort to the telephone companies that generate the so-called "call detail records" the government seeks to access.

The NSA stopped its 14-year-old collection of US phone records at 8pm ET on Sunday, when provisions of the Patriot Act that authorized it until that point lapsed. The government will argue it needs to restart the program in order to end it.

US officials did not say if the secret Fisa court will hear arguments from the newly established "amicus", who will be empowered by the Freedom Act to contest the government's contentions before the previously non-adversarial court. The Freedom Act permits the amicus to argue before the court in novel circumstances.

One of the leading congressional advocates for surveillance reform, Senator Ron Wyden, warned the Obama administration not to restart a program now roundly rejected by Congress and repudiated by a federal appeals court as illegal.

"I see no reason for the executive branch to restart bulk collection, even for a few months, and I urge them not to attempt to do so. This illegal dragnet surveillance violated Americans' rights for 14 years without making our country any safer, and the administration should leave it on the ash heap of history," Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and member of the Senate intelligence committee, told the Guardian on Wednesday.

Freedom Act Makes Snooping Worse

Wyden is correct about the illegal dragnet, so why did he foolishly revive the patriot act in any form? Is he as dumb as he now sounds, or is this an act?

Ron Paul has the right idea. He says Freedom Act Will Make Snooping Worse.

Passing the Freedom Act did not reform government snooping, so much as it made it legitimate, according to three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul. He asserts that Democrats and Republicans alike seek to reduce liberty for a promise of security.

"One thing in Washington, when they have the 'reform' of something, you cannot trust them, because reform usually means they're making things a lot worse," Ron Paul told Larry King on Politicking, Tuesday evening. "I think the reform act is a very, very dangerous thing. It's not a slight improvement, as some people argue."

A federal court ruled that Section 215 of the Patriot Act did not authorize bulk data collection, whereas the Freedom Act contains provisions to actually give the government that authority.

King brought up that in 1937, Nazi Germany abolished warrants, with Hitler saying that innocent people had nothing to hide. Many Germans found this position appealing.

"It appeals to a lot of Americans right now," said Paul. "I hear it all the time. It's scary."

Phony Reforms

Simon Black on the Sovereign Man Blog chimes in with It's Official: The USA Freedom Act Is Just As Destructive As The USA Patriot Act

U-S-A-F-R-E-E-D-O-M. Hooray!

And without fail, the media has bought in to the myth, praising the government for heralding in a new era of liberty with headlines like "Congress Reins In NSA's Spying Powers" and "NSA phone program doomed as Senate passes USA Freedom Act".

Unfortunately this is simply not the case. And shame on the mainstream media for making such thinly-researched, fallacious assertions.

If anyone had actually taken the time to read the legislation, they'd see that most of the 'concessions' made by the government are entirely hollow.

For example, the Inspector General (IG) of the United States is required to issue a report discussing what civil liberty violations may have occurred over the last few years.

Great. Except that IG reports are just that– reports. They have no teeth. And Congress can do with this one precisely what they do with every other IG report that gets issued: nothing.

Fake Patriots

Each and every day the government chips away at our freedom. Media parrots as well as fake patriots slurp it down like a cold brew on a hot summer day.

The sheep don't even realize they were fleeced.

There was not a damn thing patriotic about the Patriot Act, and the Freedom Act is 100% guaranteed to make us less free.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com