Red County, California

Western regional results of SurePayroll’s small business scorecard show that both hiring and payroll fell month-to-month in June.

California is a benchmark state for SurePayroll’s scorecard. The table below summarizing those benchmark states bleeds red for the Tarnished State.

The company’s scorecard is based on thousands of actual payrolls handled monthly for small businesses nationwide.

Recall that the latest unemployment figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics peg California unemployment at 11.2%.

For comparison, look at this chart of historical planned hiring from the June 2009 economic trends report (pdf) of the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB):

The uptick at the far right is a hopeful sign that small business nationwide is open for business and hiring. But the SurePayroll scorecard reported that hiring is up in regions other than the West, so the NFIB chart may hold no happy news for California.

(Hat tip: Orange County Register.)

A new article in Science, “Predicting El Niño’s Impacts” by Greg J. Holland, describes another Pacific warming phenomenon that could allow better medium-range weather forecasts for Atlantic hurricanes and California droughts.

An excerpt:

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ENSO teleconnections are now known to have substantial societal impacts, including food shortages and changes in insect-borne diseases (4). One of the stronger ENSO teleconnections is with global tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic Ocean (5). Here, ENSO drives large-scale atmospheric circulation changes that dominate the interannual variations in local tropical cyclone activity; activity is enhanced during cold La Niña events and reduced during warm El Niño events. This strong signal has led to extensive efforts to predict seasonal tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, first with purely statistical methods (6) and more recently with coupled general circulation models (7).

(Links in original omitted.)

A translation to plain English:

Long-range effects of Eastern Pacific warming & cooling cycles lead to crop failure and sickness caused by insects. North Atlantic hurricanes are strongly tied to these cycles, which effect year-to-year differences in the number and strength of tropical storms and hurricanes. La Niña (cool cycle) encourages more and stronger storms. El Niño (warm cycle) lowers their number and strength. Because of this strong tie, a lot of effort has been put into different ways of predicting Atlantic hurricanes based on the Pacific warming & cooling cycles, first using statistics [based on historical data] and then using theories that tie together weather pattern predictions to see how they might influence one another.

The Eastern Pacific warming & cooling cycles are also behind some of California’s rainfall (or drought). Generally, La Niña (cold cycle) means drought. (Meteorologists will sputter. Understand that the association is not straightforward.)

What are El Niño and La Niña up to now? The folks at NOAA say that the Eastern Pacific is currently “ENSO-neutral.”

Think of two kids on a teeter-totter. Right now neither the little boy (El Niño, warm) nor the little girl (La Niña, cold) is up.

NOAA expects the teeter-totter to rise in favor of El Niño. Conditions should clear over the month of July. If the little boy goes up, we should get more rain this winter here in Southern California.

But what about that new Central Pacific warming and cooling cycle described in the Science article?

Better understanding may lead to longer-term prediction of Atlantic tropical storms and California rainfall. Scientists hope that the Central Pacific cycle will allow them to step around the uncertainty when the Eastern Pacific cycle is changing (“ENSO-neutral” like now). Stay tuned.

No better time of year than the 4th of July to sharpen your surfing skillz.

Along with a well-waxed board, waterproof sunblock and a cool set of trunks (for the guys) or two-piece (for the gals), you might want to pack a copy of Elliott Almond’s book, Surfing: Mastering Waves from Basic to Intermediate (Mountaineers Outdoor Expert), for ready reference and keep your beach towel from blowing away.

Matt Coker at OC Weekly interviewed Almond about the book:

OC Weekly: What gave you the idea to include all the “non-instruction” information, and how on earth did you pack everything into 200 pages?

Elliott Almond: When Mountaineers came to me with the idea, they sent samples of other books in the Mountaineers Outdoor Expert Series collection that had a few sidebars. That’s where I saw the potential to be much more expansive. As I started my research, it became clear that basic surf instruction can be found in cyberspace. As a result, I wanted to make this book something more than what a reader could find on the Internet.

I treated the project as a journalist more than an instructor who writes for niche publications. In other words, I tried to write sidebars that would enhance the chapters, such as the profiles on a surfboard shaper and wetsuit pioneer in the section on gear. Also, surfing is just so fascinating; the more I learned from my interviews and research, the more I wanted to share it with my readers. It’s one thing to offer instruction on how to wax a board, but it seemed to be much more interesting to also explain the history of surfboard wax.

Surfing is different from skiing, snowboarding, biking and other recreational endeavors. The culture and history are integrated into the activity. If you decide to become a surfer, you need to navigate the culture as much as paddling into the lineup.

As for writing tightly, well, that comes from working in the ever-shrinking world of news print. As my industry is dying, we’re forced to write economically.

Click through for the full story.

(Hat tip: Seal Beach Daily.)

From the good folks at Mitsubishi Motors North American, headquartered in Cypress:

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Mitsubishi Motors North America (MMNA) today announced June 2009 sales of 4,362. June sales showed a modest increase over May of this year. However, this month over month sales increase defies the typical seasonality trend for this period.

“While June was a challenging sales month for automakers, there are indications that U.S. auto sales are entering a long, slow turn in the right direction. We are encouraged by the improved May and June sales figures showing a month over month increase, and hope to strengthen this momentum in the coming months,” said MMNA Executive Vice President of Operations John Koenig.

Koenig said there’s additional good news for MMNA on the product front. “The five-door Lancer Sportback Ralliart and GTS that we’re adding to our lineup this summer are being enthusiastically received by dealers,” he added. “This is an exciting extension of the award-winning Lancer family of economical and fun-to-drive cars.”

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• Mitsubishi Motors Reports May Sales (carsofjapan.blogspot.com)

If unemployment were a knife-throwing carnival act, Orange County is like the knife-thrower’s beautiful assistant, hoping that he keeps on missing.

From the latest report on unemployment from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

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Of the 49 metropolitan areas with a Census 2000 population of 1 million or more, Detroit-Warren-Livonia, Mich., reported the highest unemployment rate in May, 14.9 percent. The large areas with the next highest rates were Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, Calif., 13.0 percent, and Charlotte-Gastonia-Concord, N.C.-S.C., and Providence-Fall River-Warwick, R.I.-Mass., 12.0 percent each.

And this:

Eleven of the most populous metropolitan areas are composed of 34 metropolitan divisions, which are essentially separately identifiable employment centers. In May, the two divisions that comprise the Detroit-Warren-Livonia, Mich., metropolitan area registered the highest jobless rates: Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn, 16.0 percent, and Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, 14.1 percent. The divisions with the next highest rates were Lawrence-Methuen-Salem, Mass.-N.H., 12.4 percent, and Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale, Calif., 11.4 percent.

And also this:

Over-the-year, nonfarm employment declined in 37 of the 38 metropolitan areas with annual average employment levels above 750,000 in 2008. The largest over-the-year percentage decreases in employment in these large metropolitan areas were posted in Detroit-Warren-Livonia, Mich. (-8.0 percent), Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, Ariz. (-7.4 percent), Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, Calif., and Las Vegas-Paradise, Nev. (-6.3 percent each), and Charlotte-Gastonia-Concord, N.C.-S.C. (-6.0 percent).

Sadly, the beautiful assistant’s luck fails with the last throw, non-farm payroll employment:

Nonfarm payroll employment data were available in May for 32 metropolitan divisions, which are essentially separately identifiable employment centers within a metropolitan area. All 32 metropolitan divisions reported over-the-year employment declines. The largest over-the-year employment decrease in the metropolitan divisions occurred in Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, Ill. (-185,900), followed by Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale, Calif. (-183,600), New York-White Plains-Wayne, N.Y.-N.J. (-131,100), Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, Mich. (-106,600), and Santa Ana-Anaheim-Irvine, Calif. (-71,100).

The largest over-the-year percentage decrease in employment among the metropolitan divisions was reported in Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, Mich. (-9.2 percent), followed by Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn, Mich. (-6.2 percent), Brockton-Bridgewater-Easton, Mass. (-5.0 percent), Chicago-Naperville- Joliet, Ill. (-4.8 percent), and San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City, Calif., and Santa Ana-Anaheim-Irvine, Calif. (-4.7 percent each).

(Emphasis added.)

Ouch.

How is the Tarnished State looking? Well, the unemployment rate isn’t up to 12% yet: