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Some unfortunate news this morning. An anonymous source at TheLayoff.com wrote about an all-hands meeting at DreamWorks yesterday to announce large-scale layoffs at the studio:

Bill Damaschke called in everyone today February 5th 2013, to announce that DreamWorks will lay off 20-25% of all Company Employees. This includes people from Glendale, India and PDI. Several meetings where arranged to announce the unfortunate news. The term ‘layoffs’ was substituted by ‘transitioning outside the company.’ Most people being let go will be from the show [Me and My Shadow] and Peabody, while people comming out from Turbo will not find many spots available in other productions such as Smekday. Additionally, everyone in production will be called in next week to be announced of his status and re-casting (another term for taking your job away) positions.

20-25% of the company’s employees could potentially mean layoffs in the hunreds. DreamWorks is currently the largest animation employer in Los Angeles, and as of January 2013, the studio employed over 825 artists represented by the Animation Guild.

The reason that so many people are being let go from Me and My Shadow is because the film was removed from the release schedule and pushed back into development, according to this report on Deadline.com. Further, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, which was scheduled for 2013 release, has been pushed back to 2014. The only films that DreamWorks will release this year are The Croods and Turbo.

If you’d like to submit news about the layoffs confidentially, you can contact me HERE.

And a note to would-be commenters: This is NOT the place to discuss the content of DreamWorks film. Keep the discussion focused on labor, or risk having your comment deleted.

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If you’ve been reading the headlines on just one news service in the past few days, you’ve probably come away shaking your head and wondering what the future holds for you and yours.

Here are some examples of things in the news.

• A legislator in California has proposed that the 13 counties south of Los Angeles be separated from the main body of the state and granted statehood, to become the country’s 51^st. The apparent reason behind the proposal was that the state is simply too big to govern efficiently and needed to be pruned, so to speak. The proposed new state would be called “South California.”
• The huge iceberg that calved from a Greenland ice shelf last August is now in Canadian waters—Labrador, to be exact. Curious how it went west rather than east as common thought would expect, isn’t it? It’s being monitored by satellite from a beacon planted on its surface. Its original size was one-quarter of its parent ice shelf. That’s many billions of gallons of fresh water floating around desalinating the North Atlantic as the berg melts.
• All of those extended unemployment benefits and past government tax cuts will expire in January, leaving millions without any available income.
• Immediate results of Minnesota’s government shutdown due to lack of finances are beginning to come to the front. The Minnesota Zoo will suffer greatly if not funded soon, for instance. 

These are just a few of the headlines from yesterday and today. Granted, the Minnesota Zoo’s problems don’t seriously affect any of those living outside that state. Its fate does point to those smaller and less visible victims of gross financial distress plaguing each of the states this year.

 Costs of everything have risen, populations have increased and revenues have fallen due to the housing crunch and employment downturns.

 With unemployment benefits being suspended in January, Minnesota may not be the only state taking a leave of absence in the coming months. Those states hardest hit may follow suite in alarming numbers. And your state may just be one in the flock.

Canada is the one having to deal with the iceberg and its potential for danger—for now, at least. As the berg dissipates in the Atlantic’s northern waters the cumulative effect of all that fresh water in the Northern Atlantic will affect everyone. It’s become a favored climatological theory that desalinization of those waters helps bring about the slowing of the oceanic conveyor belt and hastens the cooling of the Earth to the point of a little ICE AGE.

And the one headline that really should clue the populace as to how shaky things are, both socially and economically, centers on the California issue. For a state—any state—to propose a split of both territory and legislation to the point of putting the motion before the state government is a rare event. It puts the spotlight even more brightly on the condition of some states to conduct business and remain solvent.

For any state to suggest such a territorial split encourages others to consider their own situations and conditions. The social ramifications are staggering for the coming year. At the moment it’s not important if the motion passes. The idea has already fallen ou

By Sydney Beveridge, Social Explorer With the new school year approaching, Social Explorer is taking a closer look at education data today and over the years. The most recent available data (from the 2009 American Community Survey) reveal education levels and distinctions among groups, as well as the correlations between educational attainment, income and employment.

By Julie MacLeavy In recent years, governments of both the right and left have been involved in debates over the best way to deliver public services. Whereas during the post-war period it was widely accepted that state provisioning of infrastructure, health, education and social services was the best way to ensure the well being of citizens, in the latter decades of the twentieth century the market was claimed to be a better way of delivering public goods and services because it was associated with competition, economic efficiency and consumer choice. Commitment to the market entailed a qualitative shift in welfare provision, whereby welfare was based less on a model in which the state counters the market and more on a model where the state serves the market.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

We have 99 Days to go before Election Day. How different things look today compared to Obama’s first 100 days. In the last year and a half, the national mood has turned from hope to uncertainty.  The sluggish job market is the economic representation of this psychological state. Business are not expanding or hiring because they do not know what the future holds for them.

The White House, in acknowledging that it expects unemployment to remain at or around 9 percent, has conceded that voters will have to deal with this state of uncertainty even as they will be invited this Fall to make up their minds about whether their members of Congress deserve another term or if it is time for another reset. A certain act given an uncertain future. That’s the crux of the political game this year.

Come November, voters will be asking: do we stay the course and give the incumbents a little more time to bring back the test results, or do we throw the bums out and issue a new test? Republicans are chanting behind one ear saying, “no results means bad results”  and Democrats are chanting in the other, saying, “wait for it, the good times are coming.” With no good news or an objective litmus test in sight, the election outcomes will turn largely on the perception of despair versus hope.

The emerging Republican narrative for Election 2010 is that all this uncertainty in the market was generated by big brother. A massive health-care bill which has made it difficult for business to predict their labor costs for the years to come; a financial deregulation bill has given new powers to government but no indication as to how such powers will be deployed; and now, talk of legislation that would allow the Bush tax cuts to expire in 2010 is only going to spook business out even more. The Republican headline is: despair; and it is time to move on.

Unless they can point to some specific pork they have brought back to their constituents, Democrats will have to deal with this national mood of uncertainty that can easily be turned into despair. The question of whether or not Democrats will lose one or both (because zero is nearly out of the question) houses of Congress will turn on how successfully, once again, they would be able to massage the reality of uncertainty away from the fairly contiguous sentiment of despair into the more unrelated sentiment of hope.

Now that was a lot easier done in 2008. When patience had run dry with Iraq and George Bush, even Independents found it easy to be optimistic about an alternative path. Anything but the status quo was cause for hope in 2008. Not so in 2010, where there is neither clear light at the end of the economic tunnel nor a wreck in sight. It would take a much bigger leap of faith this year for the same people who voted Obama into office to continue to hope that his friends in Congress will deliver on his promises. Indeed, at this point, Republicans and most Independents are probably done with hoping. They’ve heard the boy cry “wolf” too many times.

The only people who will see hope when there is only uncertainty are the Democratic party faithful. If Democrats want to avert an electoral catastrophe, their best bet is to turn out the party faithful who will

The Manwife Chronicles: As Pantless As I Want To Be by David Kaa

Review by: Chris Singer

About the author:

David brings over 746 days of experience in unemployment. There he has been responsible for sorting sock drawers, and making sure his kids don’t go to school with their shirts tucked into their underwear.

Prior to that, he did a bunch of stuff in marketing but, apparently, wasn’t very good at it. Because it always ended with him standing in the driveway, holding a cardboard box with that dead plant he’d been trying to resurrect the past six months.

David then went on to launch an initiative to perfect the afternoon nap, and write about his findings on TheManwifeChronicles.com.

David resides with his wife and two kids in Albuquerque, which looks something like a cross between the face of Mars and a cat’s litter box.

About the book:

Over six years ago I relocated from Boston to Albuquerque, which resembles something between the face of the moon and a cat’s litter box. I went from the intellectual center of the universe to a cleaner version of Mexico. It’s an understatement to say that things are a bit “different” from the Northeast. Actually, A LOT different. Darn close to ass backwards.

After a year of interviewing with every mom and pop laundry map, taco stand and fly by night company, I finally landed a job as Marketing Manager. However, things didn’t work out so well and after three and a half years it all came to an end. Now my worst nightmare has come true – unemployed in the desert without even a tree tall enough to hang myself from. That’s when I discovered the Internets to keep my sanity.

One day, in the course of a Twitter conversation, I posed a stupid question. Not surprisingly, I get a stupid answer, and it was funny. So every day I’d post a random question. Every day I would think up some stupid question, and repost some of the best answers. Questions ranged from “Uses for a throw blanket,” to “Things not to say in an interview,” and anything my unemployed mind could think up in between.

This is a collection of those posts… that I have made funnier. As well as given you the correct answers.

My take on the book:

I stayed up later than I should have last night thinking I would start this book and read a bit before going to sleep. Instead, I finished it all in one sitting while having a few too many laughing fits in the process — resulting in me getting banished to the couch to finish reading.

The author deserves a lot of credit. When you’ve been unemployed for 435 days and counting, it’s got to be hard to keep not just your sense of humor, but also find a way to keep your creative juices flowing as well.

The book is a success

Fans finally understand (what Radiohead means by calling their latest release a “newspaper album.” It’s an album that has a companion newspaper! (Duh, we should have known.) The band is distributing “The Universal... Read the rest of this post