"Since employment peaked in September 2008, local government has lost 550,000 jobs." READ MORE

"The prison population of England and Wales has hit a new record high of 86,608 people," thanks to several hundred young rioters being held in the system. Yup: 86,000 people are in prison out of a population of 53,390,300. Yeah... so that's .0016% of England and Wales. (The U.S. has about 2,300,000 people in prison, out of 307,006,550 people—almost five times as many, by population.) READ MORE

The IRS did an analysis of the 2009 tax year, and some interesting and not surprising things happened! READ MORE

About.com, the content farm owned by the Times and one of the worst things on the Internet, looks like it's finally in trouble, due in large part to Google taking action against the Garbagenet. (These outfits depend on search results.) And also: advertisers realizing there are better ways to spend money than advertising against an empty void. In the second quarter of this year, About.com shed staff and now their real operating costs are $13.1 million; their operating profit is down 24% from last year, to $11.6 million. (That's less than $4 million a month.) To be fair, this is still a "real business": The About Group had revenues of $59 million year-to-date, so hey, I'd take it, but the writing is on the wall for this as a visionary business. It's not. It's bad for the Internet and not even that great for your wallet. There's a number of not-so-great numbers at the Times, just released today for the second quarter, but let's look at the interesting numbers: who subscribes online? READ MORE

The June unemployment numbers came out this morning and everyone is like, woof, this is horrible. The Department of Labor can't even make it look all that good in the press release: "The number of persons unemployed for less than 5 weeks increased by 412,000 in June. The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was essentially unchanged over the month, at 6.3 million, and accounted for 44.4 percent of the unemployed." Right. The "underemployment" rate is now 16.2 percent, essentially as high as it was a year ago. 14.1 million are officially unemployed, a rate of 9.2%. And the average unemployment period is basically 40 weeks. READ MORE

Hey, remember the recovery from the recession? When businesses were going to make money and then the jobs would come back? Paul Krugman looks at the non-recovery of employment today. Above is the graph since 1948. There were 422,000 new claims for unemployment benefits last week.

The "real" unemployment number fell from 16.7% to 16.1% in January. The "actual" unemployment number went down to just 9%—even though there weren't a lot of jobs created in the month. The current number of unemployed people is now 13.9 million people. (Just FYI, Canada created 69,000 jobs in January!) People are still making sense of these job numbers. One thing that helps make sense of them is that the actual number of people in the labor force is now smaller, by half a million people. So yes! Unemployment is down! Fewer people consider themselves workers.

As things are currently set up, people with iPads who want to buy a magazine on their shiny device have to go searching for it. There's no magazine rack, or what have you. Still, I'm not sure you can put that sunny a face on the figures for sales of magazines on the iPad, as reported by Ad Age. Wired at least started extremely strong, at 100,000. Now they do about 30,000 an issue. Still pretty good! People is doing 10,000 an issue (and that includes free digital issues to print subscribers). Vanity Fair does about 9000 an issue. Other magazines are doing even fewer sales; many are doing about 1% of newsstand sales. There were 4.19 million iPads sold in the third quarter of this year; some say there's about 7.5 million iPads sold in total, though some estimate it's just 5 million. So at most, and the very most conservatively, at one point for Wired, during the to-date best-selling moment for magazines on the iPad, 1 in 50 iPad owners bought an issue. That number dropped to about 1 in 150. What are the other 149 people doing with their iPads is what I want to know. (Besides having Obama sign it.)