The Bay Area saw a jump in job gains in June, largely driven by the East Bay recovery but offset by job losses within the region's technology-dependent South Bay and San Francisco.

Employers within the Bay Area added 2,200 recent jobs in June, in keeping with a report released Friday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

California added 22,500 recent jobs in June. The statewide unemployment rate was unchanged from May at 5.2% and was barely higher than the 5.3% unemployment rate reported for California for February, March and April.

In the primary half of 2024, 7,400 recent jobs were created within the Bay Area, largely because of regular gains over the six months within the South Bay and East Bay.

So far this 12 months, the South Bay has added 5,300 jobs, while the East Bay has added 6,300. In contrast, the San Francisco-San Mateo region lost 3,500 jobs in the primary half of 2024 and has laid off employees every month this 12 months.

“Elon Musk's announcement last week that he will move X (Twitter) out of San Francisco, among other things, completes the hollowing out of the once vibrant tech hub in San Francisco's mid-market area,” said Michael Bernick, an employment attorney with the Duane Morris law firm and former director of the state Department of Employment Development.

But the cuts at X (Twitter) are only the most recent in a series of setbacks that tech cuts have inflicted on the greater San Francisco area.

“X's exit completes the exodus that Uber initiated in 2019, followed by Block, formerly Square, in 2022 and Reddit in 2023,” Bernick said. “Thousands of tech jobs have disappeared or will continue to disappear from San Francisco,” he added.

However, despite the sharp weakness in San Francisco's employment sector to date, the Bay Area's overall labor market appears to be starting to point out an upturn in 2024, said Scott Anderson, chief U.S. economist at BMO Capital Markets.

“After a mixed first quarter, Bay Area job growth picked up in the second quarter,” Anderson said. “It appears that the economic gloom is beginning to lift across the state and even in the Bay Area.”

In the primary three months of 2024, 1,400 jobs were lost within the Bay Area. However, within the second quarter from April to June, 8,800 recent jobs were created within the nine-county region, in keeping with seasonally adjusted figures from the Federal Employment Agency.

This pattern was also evident in California's labor market, in keeping with the federal government report.

In the quarter from January to March, 37,200 recent jobs were created in California, in comparison with 69,900 within the period from April to June.

According to this news organization's evaluation of the federal government report, California added 107,100 recent jobs in the primary six months of 2024. All figures are seasonally adjusted.

Still, California's unemployment rate has steadily worsened because the state hit its record low of three.8% in August 2022.

Despite the uneven labor market situation within the Bay Area, the economy of the nine-county region stays well positioned for the long run – at the very least not if it may possibly get a handle on some long-term problems which have plagued the region for years, says Steve Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto.

“The Bay Area has the potential for continued job growth because we have a strong manufacturing base here,” Levy said. “But success will depend on an increase in housing construction, a continued increase in immigration and the onset of lower interest rates.”

The labor market may very well be difficult for the remaining of 2024, experts warn.

However, if inflation does cool down and the Federal Reserve allows lower rates of interest, the employment situation could improve next 12 months.

“June's employment data points to a soft landing for the Bay Area economy, with inflationary pressures continuing to ease. This is the perfect environment for Fed rate cuts and a rebound in job growth next year,” Anderson said.

Originally published: July 19, 2024 at 8:15 am

A powerful solar storm created an astonishing display of sunshine within the skies across the globe overnight, but it surely appears to have caused only minor disruptions to the ability grid, communications and satellite tracking systems.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said extreme geomagnetic storm conditions continued Saturday and there have been preliminary reports of irregularities in the ability grid, deterioration in radio frequency communications and global positioning systems.

However, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said no FEMA region had reported significant impacts from the storms as of early Saturday morning.

NOAA predicted the strong outbreaks will last no less than through Sunday, and a spokeswoman said in an email that the agency's Space Weather Prediction Center had prepared well for the storm.

On Saturday morning, SpaceX's Starlink satellite web service said on its website that service was affected and the team was investigating. CEO Elon Musk wrote on X overnight that his satellites were “under a lot of pressure but have held up so far.”

Brilliant shades of purple, green, yellow and pink the northern lights have been reported worldwide, with sightings in Germany, Switzerland, London, Prague, Barcelona and elsewhere.

In the United States on Friday evening, the solar storm pushed lights much further south than normal. People in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and other Midwestern states were capable of capture photos of colours on the horizon.

NOAA said the solar storm will proceed through the weekend, providing one other probability for a lot of to see the northern lights on Saturday evening.

The agency issued a rare severe geomagnetic storm warning as a solar flare reached Earth on Friday afternoon, hours sooner than expected.

NOAA warned operators of power plants and spacecraft in orbit, in addition to FEMA, to take precautions.

“For most people here on planet Earth, they don’t have to do anything,” said Rob Steenburgh, a scientist at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center.

“This is truly the gift of space weather: the aurora,” Steenburgh said. He and his colleagues said the very best aurora views could also be achieved with phone cameras that may capture the sunshine higher than the naked eye.

Take a photograph of the sky and “maybe there's actually a little treat for you,” said Mike Bettwy, operations manager for the prediction center.

The most intense solar storm in recorded history in 1859 triggered auroras across Central America and possibly even Hawaii.

This storm poses a threat to high-voltage power lines, not the ability lines typically present in people's homes, NOAA space weather forecaster Shawn Dahl told reporters. Satellites may be affected, which in turn could disrupt navigation and communications services here on Earth.

For example, an extreme geomagnetic storm in 2003 caused an influence outage in Sweden and damaged power transformers in South Africa.

Even if the storm passes, signals between GPS satellites and ground receivers could possibly be disrupted or lost, in line with NOAA. But there are such a lot of navigation satellites that any outages are unlikely to last long, Steenburgh noted.

According to NOAA, the eruptions look like related to a sunspot 16 times the diameter of Earth. This is all a part of solar activity, which increases because the Sun approaches the height of its 11-year cycle.

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Dunn reported from Cape Canaveral, Florida, while Krisher reported from Detroit and Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska.

Grocery retailer Iceland has pledged to present its customers a voice within the upcoming UK election. If that seems like a great idea, our democracy could be in trouble.

There are prone to be general elections within the United Kingdom second half of 2024 if greater than 45 million Registered voters have their say. There will even be countless opinion polls on voting intentions and the parties and their policies.

Some voters may additionally express their views through one other platform. Iceland recently announced it could be launching one “Customer Choice Manifesto”.

The idea is that a bunch of seven customers meet monthly and present their views on political issues within the run-up to the election. These will then be combined with surveys of 6,000 regular customers, which the retailer will publish as a “manifesto” over the summer and share with political parties.

At first glance, Iceland's customer manifesto seems like a fairly good idea. UK polls and elsewhere recurrently reveal that individuals don’t trust politicians to make decisions that improve their lives.

With Iceland's support, customers are rather more prone to bring their views to politicians and maybe even take motion. As Icelandic CEO Richard Walker said on the time of the announcement: “Customers have told me they are tired of being told what is important to them and want to take their chance to be the voice of the high street.” The Island Manifesto is their probability , to do exactly that.”

Iceland's reinforcing potential is especially great because Walker himself could be very politically energetic. He has been a vocal activist on social and environmental issues and in 2022 he’s introduced himself to run as a Conservative MP. More recently he has switched allegiances and now publicly supports Labor.

Such politically engaged executives are more likely than most to bring their customers' views to politicians.

However, the Icelandic manifesto also raises some troubling questions on what the corporate wants to attain. While corporate involvement in politics all the time raises eyebrows, Walker has long maintained “Iceland is apolitical”.

How he reconciles this claim with the proven fact that the corporate becomes a political platform for its customers requires further examination. One explanation could possibly be that Iceland sees itself as an impartial translator of its customers' political preferences to politicians. Ultimately, this will not be the dealer’s opinion; they’re simply those of his customers.

However, the concept each company stays neutral in all of this and plays no role in deciding what issues to boost with its customers and prioritize within the manifesto is difficult to sustain.

It seems not possible that positions which are contrary to the corporate's interests shall be prioritized in customer discussions or in the ultimate manifesto. Iceland tells us that that is the voice of the shopper, but it surely is the corporate that decides exactly what that voice should say and the way it should say it.

Basic problems

There are two big problems behind this. The first reason is the shortage of any external transparency of the method. Political participation, for instance Lobbyingis usually viewed as more democratic when it’s transparent.

However, Iceland has not committed to releasing the transcripts of its conversations with customers or politicians, nor the polls the country will use to form opinions. We simply must depend on the opinions of corporations and communicate them to politicians.

A second major problem concerns the methodology. Political surveys and focus group approaches have well-established methods to make sure their accuracy and validity. However, official polling institutes often make mistakes.

However, within the case of the Iceland Manifesto, there may be little evidence of any try to use robust research approaches. Relying on a core group of just seven panel members is already a red flag, especially when there is no such thing as a details about how representative they’re of the broader population of Icelandic customers.

And if the initial Reports If the primary panel meeting is anything to go by, statements like “100% claimed” and “83% said” are essentially meaningless from a statistical perspective, as they really mean “seven out of seven claimed” and “six didn't say out of seven said”.

Giving percentages from a sample of seven people is just bad practice and doesn’t bode well for sound scientific research into political views.

So should we welcome the Iceland Manifesto? Given these problems, the manifesto appears to be a case of great idea and poor execution. Finding latest and higher ways to hearken to residents is vital to revitalizing our democracy. In principle, there is no such thing as a reason why a dealer shouldn’t play a task on this.

However, retailers are private entities with primarily business objectives, and their role in collecting and reporting political views have to be rigorously planned to be sure that it’s legitimate. Why do you have to consider me? Because 100% of the individuals who wrote this text agree.

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An Icelandic spokesperson told The Conversation: