Glen Campbell Dead: Today's News for August 9th

While President Trump and North Korea exchanged idol threats yesterday, the world lost someone truly important:

Tennessean:

Glen Campbell, 'Rhinestone Cowboy' singer, dead at 81

Glen Travis Campbell brought country music to new audiences. He found success as a session musician before embarking on a solo career that included smashes “Gentle On My Mind,” “Galveston,” “Wichita Lineman” and “Rhinestone Cowboy” and that landed him in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Campbell died after "a long and courageous battle with Alzheimer's disease," his family said Tuesday in a statement. He was 81. 

You didn't live during the late 1960's and early 1970's without knowing who Glen Campbell was. Between his music and his tv show, "The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour", he was huge in both country music and in pop music. He even appeared in the John Wayne film classic "True Grit".

In other news...

CNN Money:

There have never been this many job openings in America

American employers are trying to hire, but they can't find the right workers for the right price.

The U.S. boasted 6.2 million job openings in June, a record level, according to a Labor Department report published on Tuesday.

The high number of job openings illustrates a strength and a weakness of the U.S. job market. On the good side, American employers are ready to hire. During the Great Recession, job openings plunged to as low as 2.2 million in 2009. The Labor Department began tracking open positions in 2000.

On the downside, employers increasingly say they can't find skilled and available workers to fill their open positions.

A growing debate has emerged among economists: Some say American workers need better skills while others argue that employers need to offer higher wages to attract better talent.

How about all of the above? Companies are notoriously tight with pay. As for skills, they tend to require both education and experience, which excludes both inexperienced younger workers, and older workers who aren't properly trained for newer hardware and software skills.

There is another issue here too. Because of the workload requiring all of these hires, it is creating an ugly situation in the work force, whereby the already employed people are being worked to death while they await capable staff to be hired. Hiring in some companies for even entry level positions can take up to 6 months, during which employees are getting overworked and underpaid. By the time help eventually gets hired, a company might have to replace one or more other employees who have left for other jobs, or just got frustrated and quit. And the cycle begins anew.