Part of one new business strategy for making money from nothing is career advice.
At any one moment it’s easy to get the impression that half the on-line revenue in advertising now comes from either offering courses for retraining or the sale of job-hunting advice.
Nowhere is this more obvious than at my hosting provider.
Yahoo relentlessly bombards browsers with ads, columns and stories on getting a job.
For instance, the daily ‘apply for a training grant and go deep into debt to get a 2-year degree or you’ll never get a job’ pitch.
Call it working over another subprime crowd of suckers, a lure that promises reward, never to be adequately delivered, if only you’ll go deep into debt to get some kind of vocational training certificate at whatver for-profit little school is offering them in your area.
Or, there is the ‘The 10 best-paying jobs are … post.
And then the always favorite variation on what not to do during a job interview.
Typical advice, condensed: Scrupulously avoid being human and capable of error.
All of these work off the guilt-trip assumption that high unemployment in this country — more specifically, the reader’s lack of it — is the result of character and skill set faults in the job-seeker.
It’s hard to imagine a worse article or one more demoralizing than the link I’m going to post. How not to f— up an interview in 50 — that’s fifty — easily digestible bon mots.
Why only 50 Why not 100? Why not 200?
Doubtless fifty was probably thought to have the best chance at getting linkbacks and ‘most e-mailed’ status among the busy bees scavenging for jobs.
Remember, these advices and articles only work by leveraging desperation. Their ubiquity now guarantees they provide no service or common sense advice that people haven’t already considered.
They work for an industry that needs everyone to believe that American economic calamity is the fault of an inferior US worker.
DD has done the theme up previously here, here and here.
Don’t smell like a cigarette, it advises. Don’t fail to demonstrate the proper qualities of a lickspittle. Don’t smell like this or that. Don’t ask too many questions or talk too much but don’t appear mum. Don’t sit down wrong. Look at the boss but don’t look at the boss.
It’s here — furnished by someone named Karen Burns who knows how to make a job out of leveraging the joblessness of others.
Keystone Boys State will be held at Shippensburg State Teachers College in June. It’s still not too late to try and throw away a week of high summer learning to be a lickspittle, cheerleader and rule-follower at a small insignificant school in PA.
Every since a couple years ago, DD’s recollection of his week at Keystone Boys State way back in the day is still the only memoir of KBS life on the web. And it stubbornly remains a thorn in the side of Keystone Boys State here.
By comparison, KBSer’s attempts to offset this generous publicity fall by the wayside.
Here’s an excerpt from my recollections of Keystone Boys State life:
One of the objections to DD’s description of Keystone Boys State (ca. the early Seventies) was its nature as a camp administered by military men. Campers were herded, minded and ordered around by active duty members of the four services for the duration of a week in the summer even though it was ostensibly under the umbrella/direction of the Pennsylvania American Legion.
But perhaps the barking of orders, inspections and compulsory afternoon intramural sport have been packed away, relics of a much earlier era. However, in the early Seventies, it was a firm and strong part of the command structure.
Here is a video some stalwart Keystone Boys Stater has put on YouTube as counterpoint.
Young Pennsy men! Can’t you just see yourself this summer standing before some fattish guy doing military-style motivational calls and responses?
Yes? Well, heavens! Why are you still reading this blog?
Less clownish rock band with pretty girl making Faustian deals. Way less Iggy Pop.
Now, Iron Man 2 is more like it, making better use of heavy metal and rock star metaphors.
Iron Man set to AC/DC.
Mickey Rourke as The Wrestler as the Bounty Hunter as Whiplash, originally one of the “ten crappiest Iron Man villains” ever. Well-explained here.
And Don Cheadle as War Machine. Doesn’t he seem a little small for the part to you? War Machine was big and mighty, like the young Jim Brown. Ah, Robert Downey’s wee, too, and he works splendidly as Tony Stark.
Tipped by Armchair Generalist, someone with a good eye. The second trailer is cooler than the first.
Guaranteed to spawn too many US military officers and analysts telling magazines and newspapers America needs its defense contractors to make something like that. To limit collateral damage in the war on terror, of course.
In today’s New York Times Sunday magazine, from an article on what makes good teachers, a remarkable technique is cited:
In Cold Call, No. 22, stolen from Harvard Business School, which Lemov attended, the students don’t raise their hands — the teacher picks the one who will answer the question. Lemov’s favorite variety has the teacher ask the question first, and then say the student’s name, forcing every single student to do the work of figuring out an answer.
All the techniques are meant to be adaptable by anyone. To illustrate cold-calling in Boston, he showed clips of four very different teachers: Mr. Rector, whose seventh graders stand up next to their chairs as he paces among them, lobbing increasingly difficult geometry problems; Ms. Lofthus, who leans back in a chair, supercasual, and smiles warmly when she surprises one second grader by calling on him twice in a row …
Taken from the Harvard Business School, huh?
DD can’t recall being in public school in Pine Grove, PA, in the Sixties and Seventies where teachers didn’t randomly call on kids.
The New York Times Magazine is for upper middle class snobs.
From my perspective it publishes a certain flavor of pap.
And one can always count on a reinvention of the obvious.
For example, I grew up surrounded by teachers, like many Americans. My mother was a teacher at Pine Grove Area Middle School. It was the only job she ever held.
She was a reading instructor. And she hated reading.
I never saw her read a book in her free time at home, ever. She never read for pleasure. Not once — in my memory.
If you read this blog for even 20 seconds, you know DD is a reader.
When I went off to grad school in the late Seventies, my mother took books I’d accumulated over the years but could not take with me, purloining them for her class at Pine Grove Area High School.
Not liking reading, she had no books of her own. To make herself look real, she had to take my clothes.
Was my mother a reading teacher? I have no idea. I had her as my fifth grade teacher for almost a full year in Pine Grove Elementary. It’s a given that a kid ought not to have one of his parents as teacher considering the temptation to always embarrass the child as some manner of good, bad or indifferent example. I can’t recall a single uplifting thing about the experience. However, it was only fifth grade and I knew how to read.
My mom is used here, not only out of spite, but as fairly average proof of the obvious — that teaching schools often turn out those who may not be the best or who frequently don’t even particularly care about the subject they’ve chosen to be certified in. And I am certain a good portion of people my age could still point out public school teachers –ticket-punchers — who mystified because of the obvious dislike or disinterest which they held for the subjects they were earning their money on.
My mother was certified to teach reading by Millersville State Teachers College.
MSTC was a school that required liberal arts and ed students to take three units of music composition.
You’ll recall DD is a rocker and a guitar player, forced to hear his mom’s feeble efforts at composing some fragment of a tune for the course, after being told numerous times that playing the electric guitar or Iggy & the Stooges’ Raw Power too loud was Satan’s work. The class’s instructor issued a pitch pipe to every student.
If you need a pitch pipe, you’re beyond help, tone deaf.
Learning this rubbish had nothing to do with being a teacher. It was just someone’s idea on how education majors needed to be made to jump through various hoops to get their licenses validated.
When I eventually came back from Lehigh University with a Ph.D. in chemistry and before going off to do postdoctoral work at the PSU School of Medicine, I subbed at Pine Grove Area to earn money. This was a mistake.
I started as a chemistry instructor in the high school from which I graduated. This worked under the assumption, now shown to be stupid by US life, that people trained to be expert in something for over half a decade are actually well-trained experts:
I was the most highly qualified instructor Pine Grove ever had. I was quickly pulled off this, the rationale being that I was likely to destroy the reputation and credibility of the high school chem teacher who I was standing in for in front of his students.
The man had been one of Pine Grove Area’s shop teachers.
That made sense.
Don’t overexpose the kids to the Ph.D. in chemistry because it would make the shop teacher’s work harder. Y’know, just in case the young people might harbor an interest in science or something.
So I was then set to teaching algebra at the middle school.
Pine Grove’s schools did have many good teachers. Many of those I could mention are now dead. They ran the gamut from those who had tyrannical discipline — good “classroom management skills” — to those who had no discipline at all.
There was not a common set of features as to what determined a ‘good teacher’ among them. It was governed by circumstance and serendipity, plus a pool that generally was of much higher quality, in terms of raw education, than what is ‘average’ in the country now. Odds were good then that you’d get regularly better than an average cut of person.
And, of course, every classroom wasn’t a pail full of fail, needing daily heroic interventions to be rescued, coming in.
I give “Doug Lemov” — the person who’s techniques and methods are featured in the New York Times magazine — five years or less before he’s thrown to the devil and the merciless statistics of the FUBAR American system.
DD was directed into science by Pine Grove Area High School teachers from wide curricula. This must still happen but one only sees it as a sort of man-bites-dog story in today’s news. It is a great disservice to a US system of education less and less can remember.
Between then and now the country changed radically for the worse.
Among the many unintended consequences: The destruction of public schooling, to be replaced by a never-ending string of ‘problem-solvers’ haplessly trying to regain what never needed losing.
God bless my old teachers at PGAHS. I was rather lucky, it seems. Spanning hard science to athletics to high math, they were teachers I didn’t always like but who I always believed in, people who inspired the young through collegial wisdom and basic human decency.
I was traveling via Los Angeles International Airport — LAX — last week. Walking through its faded, cramped domestic terminal, I got the feeling of a place that once thought of itself as modern but has had one too many face-lifts and simply can’t hide the wrinkles anymore. In some ways, LAX is us. We are the United States of Deferred Maintenance. China is the People’s Republic of Deferred Gratification. They save, invest and build. We spend, borrow and patch.
Whenever looking up at the intellectual giants in the sky I never have to strain to see little Tommy jetting about the country (or world) to interview some really big corporate swell. Some person whose boots are always to be licked, be they a wizard sipping strawberry lemonade with Friedman on a patio at Caltech or a king of the corporate world, for it is these people who are packed with wisdoms the rest of us shits cannot fathom or appreciate.
I had a chance last week to listen to Paul Otellini, the chief executive of Intel, the microchip maker and one of America’s crown jewel companies. Otellini was in Washington to talk about competitiveness at Brookings and the Aspen Institute. At a time when so much of our public policy discussion is dominated by health care and bailouts, my public service for the week is to share Mr. Otellini’s views on start-ups.
Yes, I think we can all agree, Intel is quite the start-up. And who better to hear such a man leader than more wonderful and smart people at Brookings or the Aspen Institute, places where the rest of us are properly forbidden to go.
You can guess what comes next.
The same old story: America costs too much compared to China, a real laugher if you’ve been reading any stories about the many medium-sized towns in America emptying out and collapsing as a result of our current national sickness.
What Americans aren’t is too expensive. It’s just damn inconvenient to use them after their wages have been compressed for two decades, because the Chinese are still cheaper and one doesn’t have to worry about pollution, really squandering energy, the occasional pesky union, or dumping hydrofluoric acid into the back lot in plain sight until the silica in the earth catches on fire.
Give us more R&D tax credit, from one of the most successful companies in the world, says the guy who runs it.
Would someone tamp a cigarette out in his eye?
If the government just boosted the research and development tax credit by 5 percent and lowered corporate taxes, argued Otellini, and we “started one or two more projects in companies around the country that made them more productive and more competitive, the government’s tax revenues are going to grow.??? With the generous research and development tax credits and lower corporate taxes they receive, Intel’s chief competitors in South Korea basically have “zero cost of money,??? said Otellini. Intel can compete against that with superior technology, but many other U.S. firms can’t.
We must eat our moldy peas “because smart, skilled labor is everywhere now. Intel can thrive today — not just survive, but thrive — and never hire another American.”
To change this, of course, wealthy corporations must receive more tax credits, government incentives and rewards. So while you are eating your crappy-tasting peas this year and the next, implies little Tommy, you must hope our government smartens up enough to realize it must give much more to those who have everything before it trickles down to those of us grubbing around in the dirt.
The above is a snap from SAC Command Post, a short film made by the Air Force. One fashioned to apparently counter perceived bad publicity from the movie Dr. Strangelove.
It is here at the nuclear archive at George Washington Uni.
It’s a wonderful 18 minute snapshot from a time long gone. You could watch it back to back with Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom!
The end result is something Kubrick could have used as warm-up while the crowd seated itself prior to a showing of Strangelove. Rather than counter anything, it nicely seasons the premise of his movie which is, perhaps, why SAC Command Post never even remotely climbed into national consciousness like the former.
Full of old analog equipment and telephones, it harkens back to a time when the US actually was a world leader with a working government.
The movie opens portentously: The Strategic Air Command has the power to immediately strike back at any aggressor who would dare to start a general war.
The Soviet Union is neither mentioned nor pictured anywhere in the film.
A few teasers:
SAC, guarded by vigilant dogs so no one crazy can interfere!
A general reads his daily paper before being called to alert!
The SAC controller shows a bit of anxiousness under the cameras. Chosen for lantern jaw.
It’s only a test!
That ‘impact’ counter doesn’t go high enough.
Nothing can go worng wrong between the gold and the red telephone sets.
Yes, gentlemen, they are on their way in and no one can bring them back. For the sake of our country and our way of life I suggest you get the rest of SAC in after them, otherwise we will be totally destroyed by Red retaliation. So let’s get going, there’s no other choice. God willing, we shall prevail in peace and freedom from fear and in true health through the purity and essence of our natural fluids. — General Jack Ripper, Strangelove
Dr. Strangelove is one of DD’s favorite movies. It and the mythos of the Strategic Air Command resulted in this song, “Strategic Air Command”, on the second Highway Kings album, Brutality.
At this point, then, Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated, but they’re not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs. And they’re not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan — and there isn’t any plan, except to regain power.
But there is a kind of logic to the current Republican position: in effect, the party is doubling down on starve-the-beast. Depriving the government of revenue, it turns out, wasn’t enough to push politicians into dismantling the welfare state. So now the de facto strategy is to oppose any responsible action until we are in the midst of a fiscal catastrophe. You read it here first.
This is the paradigm set by California mentioned yesterday here.
Paradoxically, the Governator — Arnold Schwarzenegger — was on CNN on Sunday night calling his party The Party of No. And it wasn’t in the context of a compliment.
There is a great deal of irony in that the Reagan-worshipping Schwarzenegger is now just the kind of government politician the great mean of the GOP despises.
While Schwarzenegger will inherit a lasting reputation as a terrible governor, it was his own party in Sacramento which did him in.
In Washington, the blame can be spread around a little more generously. While the GOP blocks everything, the Democrats and President are equally contemptible for allowing them to succeed doing just that.
The world no longer needs a US when the superpower is run this badly.
Many years ago, when Schwarzenegger was made governor, I wrote this in the context of some spoof tunes about the situation.
The Gropinators explain the politics behind the big man’s success, using rock and roll. Our leader’s election came not through reasoned judgment, but a good old angry and mentally ill snapout, a desire of the polity to strike, to lash out, to schlag — someone in government. We weren’t going to take it! Take what? Who cares? But someone, like Gray Davis, had to be made to pay and Arnold was the benefactor. Lyric: You sent him to Sac-ra-men-to; No rotten car tax, no, no! We sent ‘im to Sac-ra-men-to; We’re not gonna take it, no, no! Arghhh! Danger! Get out of the way, we might have to hit you.
Sound familiar?
Schwarzenegger was elected by the public on his promise to eliminate the car tax. He did so and forced a refund for everyone in the state who had ever paid it. The shortfall caused by that overturned the state government’s finances and precipitated the current catastrophe. The California legislature — effectively ruled by the minority GOP, like the US Senate — blocked all efforts by Schwarzenegger to do anything palliative.
The comedy song, “I Think We Should Make a Carla Sandwich,” which was about the publicizing of the governor’s reputation as a serial groper — in particular, one woman named Carla, prior to his installment is here.
Real Arnold vocals, too. If you don’t laugh, you’ll surely have to cry.
Sunday night, 60 Minutes and Lesley Stahl delivered a blank box, said to be ready to change the world.
This is not so surprising. Everyone in 2010 USA knows the country is overrun by rascals gaming the news for their own benefit.
That’s where John Doerr, the smartest venture capitalist in the world — known for saying really grand things about whatever he’s involved in — comes in.
DD used to see his name all the time in synthetic biology stories, so you already know where this is going.
In other words, if Doerr is involved, you get great-sounding pap that never really delivers.
Biotechnologies, Inc., a privately-held company applying advances in synthetic biology to produce high-value pharmaceuticals, fine chemicals and biofuels, has raised $20 million in a first round of venture funding.
The Series A financing was led by Khosla Ventures, with additional participation from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), and Texas Pacific Group Ventures (TPGV). The company also announced the appointment of John G. Melo, previously president of US Fuels Operations for BP, as CEO. Also joining the Amyris board at this time are Samir Kaul, general partner, Khosla Ventures; John Doerr, general partner, KPCB; and Geoff Duyk, managing director, TPGV.
Amyris Biotechnologies uses synthetic biology techniques to create new metabolic pathways in industrial microbes to produce novel or rare chemicals. Amyris’ primary project to date has focused on the use of synthetic biology to address supply and cost constraints limiting the use of the anti-malarial drug artemisinin. With the new funding (and CEO), Amyris will work on producing biofuel molecules—ethanol, butanol, or other hydrocarbons.
Greentech could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st Century. Novel renewable energy sources will be key. John Melo is the perfect CEO to help Amyris innovate and lead in renewable fuels. At BP, he ran a multi-billion fuel operation with early commercial success with ethanol. John’s insights, skills, and relationships are highly complementary to the deep technical talent of the Amyris founders. —John Doerr, KPCB
That was four years ago. Malaria remains stubbornly unlicked by John Doerr and Amyris. The reliable ticket to controlling it is mosquito netting. And green fuel delivered by synthetic biology, ending global warming, is still maddeningly elusive.
But now for 60 Minutes Doerr is pimping a company that makes a fuel cell called “the Bloom Box.”
It was, of course, delivered as a game changer, without ever really explaining how it works.
However, if one looked at transcript, the figures leaking out on the newest magic were not particularly impressive.
“[The man who runs the Bloom Box company, some ex-NASA guy named Bloom] installed [his] boxes [at one company], each one costing $700-800,000,” reported 60 Minutes.
“Four units have been powering a Google datacenter for 18 months,” continued the news program. “They use natural gas, but half as much as would be required for a traditional power plant.”
Still dependent on fossil fuel for electricity. And not even close to being even one order of magnitude better than electricity from a ‘traditional power plant.’
“John Donahoe, eBay’s CEO, says its five boxes were installed nine months ago and have already saved the company more than $100,000 in electricity costs,” continued 60 Minutes.
5 Bloom boxes x $750,000 = $3,750,000
Bloom boxes save eBay $100,000 every nine months.
$3,750,000 / $100,000 = 37.5
37.5 x 9 months = 337.5 months
337.5 months / 12 = 28.12500
The investment in eBay’s magic Bloom boxes will break even in a short 28 years.
Groundbreaking stuff.
“I like to say that the new energy technologies could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century,” John Doerr told Lesley Stahl.
“Asked if the Bloom box is intended to get rid of the grid, Doerr told Stahl, ‘The Bloom box is intended to replace the grid … for its customers. It’s cheaper than the grid, it’s cleaner than the grid.'”
Get your King James version of the Bible on CDs for only $19.95.
I could not resist this delightful story, spied today at the Register, on Sink the Bismarck!, the world’s mightiest beer.
Reports the Reg:
A Scottish brewer appears to have torpedoed a German rival’s claim to the world’s strongest beer, by bottling a “quadruple IPA” weighing in at a liver-bashing 41 per cent ABV.
Just weeks after German outfit Schorschbrau floated its 40 per cent Schorschbock, Aberdeenshire hop-botherer BrewDog has counterattacked with the provocatively-named Sink The Bismarck
“[At] £40 for a 330ml bottle, we doubt anyone will be quaffing a Sink the Bismarck! like Saturday night fighting lager,” adds the Register, somewhat drily.
That’s about $62.70.
Coincidentally, Pasadena has two upscale stores known for sale of pricey and super-pricey UK ales: Whole Foods on the east side and Bristol Farms in south Pas.
Although Sink the Bismarck! is only sold on-line, DD is sure there are probably a number of people in the mansion districts who’d buy it, if only for the conspicuous consumption display value.
Buckfast Tonic Wine remains seemingly unthreatened as the hooligan solvent of choice in Scotland.
The Reg includes a wonderful pic of an old Spitfire ale advertising campaign. I had to borrow it.
If memory serves, DD has seen Spitfire, and even bought it once or twice, in Pasadena.
The Germans would seem to have little retaliatory recourse in the naming wars.
Graf Spee?
Nope, beaten off the River Plate by inferiors.
Gunther Prien, the U-boat commander who sneaked into Scapa Flow and torpedoed Royal Oak?
Nope, too obscure.
They could steal Hood, with the tagline — “Almost everyone goes down in one bottle.”
