It’s hard to outdo the New York Times when the newspaper reports on the field of synthetic biology.
What you always get is a radical departure from reality for the sake of hype and nonsense to delight the inner child. Or, on the other hand, something radically intelligence insulting.
It’s a nice gig, particularly when it’s done from within the pages of the newspaper’s Sunday magazine.
It’s hard to come up with a more ludicrous lede graf than this:
It all started with a brawny, tattooed building contractor with a passion for exotic animals. He was taking biology classes at City College of San Francisco, a two-year community college, and when students started meeting informally early last year to think up a project for a coming science competition, he told them that he thought it would be cool if they re-engineered cells from electric eels into a source of alternative energy. Eventually the students scaled down that idea into something more feasible, though you would be forgiven if it still sounded like science fiction to you: they would build an electrical battery powered by bacteria. This also entailed building the bacteria itself — redesigning a living organism, using the tools of a radical new realm of genetic engineering called synthetic biology.
“Synthetic biology is the coolest thing in the universe,??? babbles some community college biology professor to the NYT writer, Jon Mooalem.
Change the world, make bacteria that squirt gasoline and/or electricity,
transform the world from community college at 26 dollars a credit. You name it, we’ll do it.
“Moo,” said the synthetically engineered cow as it ate ground-up rubber tires and plastic from a landfill, converting them to USDA grade-A beef.
But the magazine won’t let up. Once the magic wand of literary license begins to wave, there’s no putting it down:
As commercial applications for this kind of science materialize and venture capitalists cut checks, the hope is that synthetic biologists can engineer new, living tools to address our most pressing problems. Already, for example, one of the field’s leading start-ups, a Bay Area company called LS9, has remade the inner workings of a sugar-eating bacterium so that its cells secrete a chemical compound that is almost identical to diesel fuel. The company calls it a “renewable petroleum.??? Another firm, Amyris Biotechnologies, has similarly tricked out yeast to produce an antimalarial drug. (LS9, backed by Chevron, aims to bring its product to market in the next couple of years. Amyris’s drug could be available by the end of this year, through a partnership with Sanofi-Aventis.) Stephen Davies, a synthetic biologist and venture capitalist who served as a judge at iGEM, compares the buzz around the field to the advent of steam power during the Victorian era. “Right now,??? he says, “synthetic biology feels like it might be able to power everything. People are trying things; kettles are exploding. Everyone’s attempting magic right and left.???
If you want to build a bookcase, you can find a nice tree, chop it down, mill it, sand the wood and hammer in some nails. “Or,??? says Drew Endy, an iGEM founder and one of synthetic biology’s foremost visionaries, “you could program the DNA in the tree so that it grows into a bookshelf.???
DD broke down the hype at The Register last year in a piece entitled Promote Your Local Synthetic Biologist.
Let’s take the wayback machine and see how well the Times story fits the cliches and rubbish:
Having delved into Lexis, [I] can say with authority that a couple of hundred major stories have run on [synthetic biology] in the last two years. They fall into two categories: Rewritten press releases distributed by newspapers, made only for the purpose of announcing the synthetic biologist and how world-changing his research effort/company will be; and stories explaining how synthetic biologists will revitalise the world, but bad synbiologists will be making diseases, bioterrors and bio-errors, killing millions.
Margaret Atwood wrote a hack sci-fi novel, Oryx and Crake, on this in 2005. The most amusing part was the premise that only two jobs will exist in the future – a person could be a synthetic biologist, or an ad copywriter doing promotions for synthetic biology companies. This showed Atwood had an appreciation for the megalomania in press release news on the subject …
The more one reads the proclamations from synthetic biologists, the more one finds they seem to have in common with the claims delivered by civilian egotists at the Pentagon who went on about a revolution in military affairs before Iraq went bad.
Biology, in fact all science, is given new starch. And anything fantastic that can be imagined will happen. The obstinacy of nature, results dictated from Murphy’s Law in which experiments simply do not work – or actually do work, but just in ways that are no more or less productive than previously – is not in this story.
The script on synbio also demands the saluting of Amyris Biotechnologies, founded by Jay Keasling, as the firm which will cure malaria, according to the New York Times. The Times, by the way, appears to have had the greatest number of significant suck-up pieces on synbio published in newspaperland in 2007. If the number of times Amyris’s work on producing a new source of the anti-malarial, artemisinin, is the criteria by which such a thing is accomplished, malaria’s trouncing is in the bag; with the answer to global warming as the icing on the cake.
Since this is the active reality, one must expect bragging about the character of our future saviors.
“[There’s] a nobleness and commitment they bring to these problems that I find really inspiring,” said [prince of Silicon venture capital] John Doerr to the Times in June. Of course, he was bankrolling the same noblemen.
Summer was also for newspapermen to declare a consortium of universities working on biofuels – Stanford, UC Davis and UC Berkeley – to be the equivalent of the Manhattan Project, press which some scientists actually involved seemed to believe. (This Manhattan Project is in addition to the Manhattan Project the US military mounted to conquer IEDs. That went well.)
A lab director from Berkeley, Graham Fleming, told the Contra Costa Times the work was “probably the most important thing any of us will do in our scientific lives… We’re off on a great adventure”.
“Cellulosic ethanol is just the beginning, and not even an ideal one,” reported the journalist tasked with delivering the grand vision. The reader will have noticed that, historically, the work of many scientists being compared favorably to the Manhattan Project prior to actually achieving anything is a recent American invention, perhaps to sow confusion and head off disappointment if, and when, new Manhattan Projects flop.
“‘Grow a house’ is on the to-do list of the MIT Synthetic Biology Working Group, presumably meaning that an acorn might be reprogrammed to generate walls, oak floors and a roof instead of the usual trunk and branches,” reported the New York Times in publishing another blowhard piece on synbio in July.
Ten years ago, people from MIT were dispensing this scented bathwater.
“[We may develop] a tree which has gasoline or kerosene as its sap… Maybe you’ll plant a house, let it grow, and then move into it,” wrote W Daniel Hillis, ex of the MIT Media Lab for the LA Times in 1997.
While at Lehigh University and working on a PhD in chemistry in the mid-Eighties, this writer was familiar with a faculty member, a molecular geneticist, studying Trichoderma reesei, a fungus which produced cellulases. Of course, the big-eyed idea then was also to define and apply the science enough so as to enable the maximum production of cellulase for use in production of biofuels.
The scientist built a career on it, but cellulosic ethanol still isn’t running the country. Although cellulase from T. reesei is used in the digestion of cellulose, it is not especially inexpensive or practical. In the past couple of years, an oil-rush-before-actual-oil industry has sprung up, one which promises cheap cellulases as well as many other things. Much of it is new snake oil for the investment rubes, lubricating jacked-up subsidies, grants, and hand-outs to the corn industry for benefits no one sees except as costlier food.
Without going into great detail on why the infinite bounty of nature’s enzymes has resisted easy lending to cheap-as-water industrial transformations, it may suffice to say that old-timey molecular geneticists and biochemists knew something of the limitations in engineering various microbial boxes. And they tended not to waste a lot of time explaining it to journalists who usually didn’t want to hear it, anyway.
It involves some complication to explain precisely why, for example, active proteins which work miraculously well for the microbial systems in which they evolve, tend to become increasingly unstable when removed, purified, and put in a different environment. Regardless of having genetic sequences for the production of cellulases in hand, lifetimes can be spent puzzling over and characterising the fine details of a protein’s chemistry and its interaction with the world at large.
You also can’t have a proper synthetic biology blowjob without including a storm cloud amid all the sunny skies. And Drew Endy, as genius and wizard, must make an appearance.
“The rise of synthetic biology only intensifies ethical and environmental concerns raised by earlier forms of genetic engineering, many of which remain unsettled,” reads the Times. “Given synthetic biology’s open-source ethic, critics cite the possibility of bioterror: the malicious use of DNA sequences posted on the Internet to engineer a new virus or more devastating biological weapons.”
For Oryx and Crake , Margaret Atwood’s bit of science-fiction on what synthetic biology would do to the world, almost everyone is killed off with a manmade plague put into pills for increasing sexual potency.
“So beware of how we are being sold this scientific revolution with pledges to help Africa’s poor and ease global warming,” wrote someone for the Brit newspaper The Guardian around the time I did Promote Your Local Synthetic Biologist.
“How synbio could go wrong keeps even dedicated synthetic biologists awake at night,” it was said.
Since I purposely kept away from mentioning Drew Endy for the piece in el Reg, sort of like a tree growing into a roving bookshelf, he showed up for the comments section — a keen observer of the press on the subject.
“I was grateful to see your article’s attempt to bring some perspective to the current press-driven hype frothing around synthetic biology.” commented Endy. “It would be good to develop still more perspectives on how synthetic biology is (or is not) any different from the last 35 years of biotechnology and genetic engineering. There are some real changes underway, but most of them are at the level of underlying technologies used to design and build genetic systems, and not in the high profile applications that attract most of the attention. A good place to learn more is to study the student project presentations from the iGEM jamboree … ”
Today’s unintended joke comes from Yahoo’s news service for the promotion of guilt, appreciation of parasites and furtherance of lickspittling.
Remember when you were bullied and beaten for reading books or having thick glasses or being shitty in gym?
Well, it was all your fault, ‘science’ says.
“Kids who get bullied and snubbed by peers may be more likely to have problems in other parts of their lives, past studies have shown,” read Yahoo today. (No link.)
“And now researchers have found at least three factors in a child’s behavior that can lead to social rejection … The factors involve a child’s inability to pick up on and respond to nonverbal cues from their pals.”
If you’re a parent, here’s what you to do to correct your bullied child’s errant ways:
Help the child identify the cue they missed or mistake they made, by asking something like: “How would you feel if Emma was hogging the tire swing?” Instead of lecturing with the word “should,” offer options the child “could” have taken in the moment, such as: “You could have asked Emma to join you or told her you would give her the swing after your turn.”
Create an imaginary but similar scenario where the child can make the right choice. For example, you could say, “If you were playing with a shovel in the sand box and Aiden wanted to use it, what would you do?”
Lastly, give the child “social homework” by asking him to practice this new skill, saying: “Now that you know the importance of sharing, I want to hear about something you share tomorrow.”
The studies are detailed in the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. They were funded by the Dean and Rosemarie Buntrock Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation.
These people are indeed tricky as they couch the advice in the reverse — it is YOU, YOU — the child, who were bullying by doing something like NOT SHARING and so you got what you deserved when the ante was upped and Aiden took that shovel off you by force and hit you over the head with it.
You see, you had it coming.
True story from my youth in Pine Grove, Pennsyltucky.
My friend Dirk and I were playing in his backyard one day. Dirk was a teaser. He was teasing me about something, I forget what. It went on and on and on.
Finally, I leaned over and bit him in the face right under the eye. An inch or two up and he would have lost that orb. That teasing was abruptly stopped. It took a quick trip to the doctor and a clamp to staunch the bleeding.
He had a tiny scar on his face from that for decades. Perhaps he still has it.
About eight years later I used to get bullied a lot in gym for being small and detesting the playing of softball or touch football which is about all we were allowed to do. I was small. Did I say, that?
Of course, that was all my fault, too.
As soon as I could I started weightlifting and went out for the wrestling team. When you can bench or curl at least one hundred pounds more than your peers weigh they become like putty when within your grip. I quietly and calmly muscled those who were stupid enough to cross me in the gymnasium. (It did not, though, fix the fetish for softball.)
I support this kind of bullying and applaud if you do, too. Kids, young and old: Bite some asshole in the face, the sooner the better.
I thought Rorschach was the best character in Watchmen.
“One of the kids smashes a piece of fruit in [young] Rorschach’s face and then Rorschach takes a cigarette out of the bully’s mouth and then shoves it in the bully’s eye. Rorschach then attacks the other bully and starts biting his face. Several bystanders then try to pull Rorschach off.”
“Matthew Robson, an intern at Morgan Stanley’s London office, has lots to say about media platforms of all kinds — so much that the bank’s analysts asked him to assess the habits of his friends when it comes to TV, radio, the Internet, the works,” writes Mark Lacter at LAObserved.
For this to make sense, keep in mind Lacter contributes to the coverage LAObserved reserves for the ongoing collective nervous breakdown and collapse of journalism at the Los Angeles Times. And as part of that, and part of the media scene in LA as a whole, there’s a regular interest in the loss of readership to the freetard crowd.
With that comes the regular appearance of what DD calls, “Let’s ask what one of the Lords of the Flies thinks!”
Translated, it’s called the “ask the teenager!” exercise. Or, in this case, the poxy fifteen-year old.
However, DD freely admits that at the age of fifteen he was a bona fide douchebag, like almost all fifteen year-old boys. And he liked shit that was free, even though there wasn’t an Internet to ease the mooching.
So, in Lacter’s piece, readers are directed out to a ‘study’ put out by Morgan Stanley, one in which “Matthew Robson,” fifteen years old, spills the beans on stuff even your dog or cat probably knows.
From an older blog entry on this old tactic:
DD has now been in cyberspace for almost two decades and has seen a variety of teenagers come and grow into not-teenagers along with stories in which journalists seek their wisdom in order to divine the future. The results have always been the same, just like reading unmoderated comments pages or the old Usenet: You get a kick in the nuts and your glasses broken, gratis.
One thing DD can tell from the Morgan Stanley report, which is here. Their banks analysts and bosses are not just really cheap. They also enjoy playing their clients for fools.
Banksters taking clients for a ride. How novel.
Take this emission from the fifteen year-old wanker, on TV habits: “Most teenagers watch television, but usually there are points in the year where they watch more than average. This is due to programs coming on in seasons…”
“That’s brilliant!” to paraphrase the cartoon guy in the old Guiness commercial.
“Teenage boys usually watch more TV when it is the football season …” it continues, in case you thought such nuggets of precious nose gold were a fluke.
“No teenager that I know of regularly reads a newspaper, as most do not have the time and cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the news summarized on the Internet or on TV,” reports Robson.
It’s not hard to imagine the sound of the voice. It’s the Lord of the Flies tone, the one used to explain how ‘you’, Piggy, will be getting no meat at the pig roast.
Did DD say he was a fifteen-year old douchebag, too? And I didn’t read the newspaper, either.
There was one key difference. My opinions were not collected by a business consultancy, for free, to be resold as advice to the easily hoodwinked.
“Young Robson stands out because his findings are attracting such attention — even as they seem so anecdotal and flimsy,” writes Lacter at LAObserved.
When one does a show, a website or a blog with the word ‘cyber’ in its name, one ought to work a little harder to not appear adrift and without a paddle … in cyberspace.
KPCC in Pasadena, DD’s hometown, hosts Cyberfrequencies, a show and posting site devoted to covering celebrity news on the web. Its latest piece on famous showbiz blogger Nikki Finke is here.
Sadly, Cyberfrequencies is also a gold-plated spam magnet, its pages littered with comments from a variety of fraudsters hawking everything from cheap insurance and prescription drugs to erectile dysfunction medications. “Share thy Booty” is the unintentionally hilarious title of this post. Mouse over the links, note the uniquely and colorfully named domains. For fairly obvious reasons having to do with patterns of malicious misuse on the Internet, you won’t want to follow them.
Indirectly proven by science in this piece from the New York Times.
It’s about the summer swimming seaon and diarrheal illness.
DD managed a swimming pool for four years in his undergrad days. At this time, admittedly many many years ago, the Pine Grove Community Swimming Pool was not a vector for disease. Checks for fecal coliforms, which would not detect cryptosporidiosis — not an observable problem in the Seventies, were regularly performed.
Because of a rise in cryptosporidiosis, a parasitic illness, health experts now feel compelled to issue advice which seemed obvious thirty years ago.
“In addition to not swimming while ill with diarrhea, health experts say people should shower before swimming and never use the pool as a toilet,” reports the Times.
Yes, defecating in the swimming pool is crass and bad. Also obvious and sickening.
There is no stealthy shitting in a busy public swimming pool, unlike sneaking the other thing, which everyone does. DD did not realize that Americans now had to be warned not to do the former.
“Parents should wash young children before they enter the pool and take them on frequent bathroom breaks. Children in diapers require vigilant attention.”
Yes, people, give your lifeguards a break this summer! They’re only making minimum wage.
It’s a well-known fact that access to all the amateur homespun talent on YouTube has made the world a richer place. How, for instance, could one live without all the slideshow copyright-infringing home videos uploaded by ‘fans’ sampling from their record collections? Or all the duplicates of Cherie Currie of the Runaways singing “Cherry Bomb” in her underwear and nylons for the Japanese in 1977?
It would be difficult to top the latter in its actualized potential for sheer adult embarrassment.
But DD has found lots of music-oriented stuff even more teeth-grinding and capable of getting the cold sweat out on the back of your neck.
Home videos of guys trying out their new store-bought mini-amplifiers. Static videos of the camera looking at a guitar amp with an occasional hand entering the stage to twist a knob.
This is a select group, only done for and by guys.
DD couldn’t find any female contributors. And, like last week’s ‘battle bands’ collection, it’s a challenge to endure more than 30 seconds. Persevere! With the exception of the last one, they’re all guaranteed horrendous!
The first one DD calls simply: “The Cough Syrup Addict.” Turn on the lights, buddy! It’s in “Cloverfield” approved Shakey-Cam and the very definition of ‘excruciating’ from beginning to end, including the Hendrix and Guns ‘n’ Roses stuff. As unendurable as possible, watched over twelve thousand times.
This next one is tricky. The beginning makes you think the player actually might have done the good-sounding fragment. Patience! The real thing is about to begin — a bit of bedroom ‘Stairway to Heaven’, then born to be mild AC/DC and Ozzy. Seventy thousand watches. How long do you think it took his friends and family to rack that up?
Oops! So tone deaf, he can’t tell when the guitar is out of tune! 30,000 hits! Oh, f— me, not more Ozzy and AC/DC!
Another punishing version of ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ “Awesome!” comments someone. Yeah, 71,000 instances of masochism is pretty awesome.
This next one is cheating. It’s the company’s sales rep in the firm’s pro video. Hang around, look at the annoying hairstyle. He’ll eventually get around to the patience-smashing bedroom shredding, knowing it’ll send a legion of guys like those above, to the store. And then to YouTube.
A computer nerd gives us a bird’s eye view of his very clean desk and a standard dose of bad thrash metal. Then, without even a hint of a sense of humor, some ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ and ‘Freebird.’
“OK, so I’m doing another demo of this Orange Crush amp because my other one didn’t do it justice,” says ShortScaleGearDemos. After the harsh, crystalline tone along with the bursts of tuneless feedback and chaos, DD trembles at the thought of such a ‘bad’ video. Right about now, the CEO of the maker is wondering how to get this off YouTube. Only eight thousand views, though, so damage is limited.
The one worth your patience, a video of someone playing the guitar and singing in such a way to make you jump up and shout for the glory of rock ‘n’ roll and a good song. It’s a girl! Canada’s Kathleen Edwards, singing “Cheapest Key,” onstage in Europe.
A paltry five hundred and change views. Your YouTube global market, in action.
Today’s venereal wart-like curiosity: A ridiculous article at Playboy on the US military’s ‘Battle Bands.’
“These days, martial music also means Marshall stacks,” writes a Playboy hagiographer. “That’s right, soldiers rock — officially.”
Hmmm, not by the evidence presented, lil’ pardner.
What listeners and viewers do witness: The same kind of stuff bar bands have peddled in every ‘burgh and hamlet in the US for the last thirty years. It’s milder by loads, since one should presumably not hear swearing or see women take off their tops when in video repping a service arm to the public. Or throw cups of beer and bottles of whiskey in a power drunk fit.
Caveat emptor: Most people won’t be able to stand more than thirty seconds of the linked videos.
Ready for the Motel 6 ballroom on Friday night. Good mix on the horns, though.
The Greenwood Hill HH&L Bingo Hall Show Band in action.
If you’re going to sing a pomp metal song entitled “Locked & Loaded,” shouldn’t it sound like you’re about to, er, take the warpath and kill someone?
However, the undisputed King of Born to Be Mild rock is Mike Huckabee. So, perhaps, the ‘Battle Bands’ are in good company. And, indisputably, there is no evil in playing rock ‘n’ roll for the baby-stroller crowd.
“A milky gas slowly filters in. An Arab man with an Egyptian accent says: ‘Start counting the time.’ Nervous, the dog starts barking and then moaning. After flailing about for some minutes, it succumbs to the poisonous gas and stops moving.
“This experiment almost certainly occurred at the Derunta training camp near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, conducted by an Egyptian with the nom de jihad of ‘Abu Khabab.’ In the late 1990s, under the direction of Al Qaeda’s number two, Ayman Al Zawahiri, Abu Khabab set up the terrorist group’s WMD research program, which was given the innocuous codename ‘Yogurt.’ Abu Khabab taught hundreds of militants how to deploy poisonous chemicals, such as ricin and cyanide gas. The Egyptian WMD expert also explored the possible uses of radioactive materials, writing in a 2001 memo to his superiors, ‘As you instructed us you will find attached a summary of the discharges from a traditional nuclear reactor, among which are radioactive elements that could be used for military operations.’ In the memo, Abu Khabab asked if it were possible to get more information about the matter ‘from our Pakistani friends who have great experience in this sphere.’ This was likely a reference to the retired Pakistani senior nuclear scientists who were meeting then with Osama bin Laden.”
All of this sensational material, a lead-in for Bergen’s discussion of the US’s Predator drone assassination campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan. For it to have value in this story, one must buy into the idea that in erasing ‘Abu Khabab,’ a Predator drone strike eliminated an al Qaeda capability in chemical and biological weapons. Instead of just offing some odious nobody.
But readers have learned that when it comes to the war on terror, and what the enemy is said to be able to do, much is exaggerated, the product of gossip passed on or published by someone else, or simply made up out of whole cloth by unreliable or anonymous sources working their own agendas.
Indeed, many will remember videotape of a small dog being gassed in a room, recovered during the invasion of Afghanistan. Played hundreds of times during news shows, you would have had to be living without power and water in the hills of North Carolina to have missed it.
However, since then, al Qaeda has shown zero capability in the area of chemical and biological weapons. What has been shown, again and again by DD on the web, is that they have had aspirations and lots of rubbish documents, all amounting to nothing. If ‘Abu Khabab’ had been training “hundreds of militants how to deploy poisonous chemicals, such as ricin and cyanide gas,” he was the world’s worst ‘teacher,’ an unmitigated failure and fool.
For examples of jihadist ‘capabilities’ and ‘documents’ on deploying poisonous chemicals see here and here and here on dirty bombs and here on even more poisons. And for a discussion of al Qaeda’s somewhat less-than-successful stabs at making a cyanide gas bomb, see here. And, since Bergen mentioned ricin, don’t forget all the evidence from the London ricin case, here.
Related:
‘Abu Khabab,’ the alleged chemical weapons expert, has been peddled for awhile now.
“President Barack Obama wants unemployment insurance to become a stepping stone for future work by making it easier to enroll in school or job training,” reported AP today. “Whether he succeeds will depend on the willingness of states and colleges to change the rules.”
“‘Community colleges applauded the president’s plan. George Boggs, president of the American Association of Community Colleges, said Obama would remove obstacles that keep the unemployed from heading back to school. The association represents about 1,200 such colleges.”
AP noted the US Education Department will boost the maximum Pell Grant $500 to the whopping sum of … $5,350.
Currently, a year at the University of Southern Cal costs about $55,000.
Republicans immediately chided the President over costs.
“Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a former Republican Party chairman, said his state already allows the unemployed to enroll in job training and encourages them to do so,” informed the AP.
Such unemployment reforms may quickly clear the way for the jobless to enroll in community college, making courses available to train them for a multiplicity of jobs.
Such jobs will include but not be limited to: test-tube cleaning, shelving and getting reagents, learning to use a Metler balance, mucous, surgical drain and breathing pipe maintenance, teeth scraping, gram-staining, changing oxygen tanks for those with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, blood pressure-taking, temperature taking, enema giving, supervision of administration of Fleet’s Phospho-Soda, cleaning up messes in hospitals and clinics, airport security, turnstyle security, public transit security, frisking, pat downs and strip searching, simple detentions, immigration status checking, herding, temporary staffing, manning the metal detectors at court houses, X-ray smock fitting, checking dosimeters, wheelchair-bound patient moving, massage, bed pan emptying, restraining and strapping the old and mentally ill into chairs in various warehousing environments, bed sore monitoring, security work in privately administered prisons, embalming, corpse dressing, using word processor and accounting software, installing anti-virus software, transcribing, bank tellering, cafeteria work, how to wear a sterile smock, simple sterile procedures, transfers and transport of pees and poos in the clinical lab setting, refrigerated organ transport, transport of organs reclaimed from cadavers, preparing cadavers for organ reclamation, selling door to door, telemarketing, on-line promotion and astro-turfing, using Blogger, search engine optimization, building a network with Twitter, repeat calling debt collection, data entry and processing tax returns, using Adobe Acrobat or Photoshop and using Microsoft Powerpoint.
Robert Titman, an expert on the economic impact of continuing education at the City College of Gobble-Wallah in Birmingham, Alabama, predicted that in the next two years the US would see a big economic boom from the new highly educated and skilled workforce. The country would leap to the forefront in retraining the unemployed, providing a leading example for the rest of the world, he said.
Today’s post points toward a column, written by the well-known Barbara Ehrenreich, on another uniquely American sham: That job-hunting is your new job. So get to it. (Incidentally, Ehrenreich — aside from being the most well-known author and critic on the nature of the workplace in modern America, is the public face of United Professionals, an “advocacy group to protect and preserve the American middle class.”)
It’s here — entitled “Trying to Find a Job is Not a Job.”
It encapsulates the concept — mentioned briefly here about a year ago — that Americans have been manipulated into accepting as true all sorts of rubbish about employment and their lack of it. Like: It’s your fault if you don’t have a job; your lack of skills made you obsolete; you aren’t looking hard enough for a job, you must make yourself over into a job-hunting machine; you have to go back to school many times in your life to keep yourself hep and fresh in the marketplace, and most off all, repeat it again and again — IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT WORKING HARD ENOUGH, YOU WEAK SOD!
In a way, it boils down to a novel solution to the problem mass unemployment poses for national security. If the populace is being thrown out of work en masse, and it’s perceived to be the fault of leaders (rather than the people themselves), chances are they might think of going into the street in social protest. Such protests could become more virulent. They could bring down the government, or at least change it during the burning of things. Or also bring about some public facsimile of tarring and feathering for the geniuses at Goldman Sachs, AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup, etc.
Instead, because most people buy into the sham, what we get is everyone just sitting at home. Perhaps all Twittering or Facebooking away in hope that a social network of strangers will dispense mercy upon them.
Journalists from business and employment sections have actually said it was good to do this. Really. See here at “Getting Fired is Now Fun.”
Or everyone can upload endless variations of their resumes to Monster or Careerbuilder because it’s been said that this must be done, along with 450 million others and one must have, oh — say, five or six, ten or maybe more different resumes to cover every contingency. And don’t forget to re-write that thing from scratch the next time you upload.
“In America, being unemployed doesn’t mean you have nothing to do but run around burning police cars,” Ehrenreich writes. “Unemployment has been reconfigured as a new form of work.”
Part of your new job is guessing what your future job ought to be. Or failing that, listening to other people, shamming as experts and asking for money, telling you what it ought to be. Then you can run off to a continuing education course or Pasadena City College, or enroll in an on-line diploma mill, and after a year get a chit or certificate in something which you were told will get you a job. And then it won’t. But that’s because you guessed wrong or were lazy or something. Do not pass “Go,” do not collect $200. Go directly to jail.
From January of 2008 of last year, when things were beginning to look dicey, DD requotes from here on “Preparing for Your Dream Job.” That’s from the old blog, the one that can’t be updated because Google Blogger fell over and crushed me.
Want to know the secret of landing your dream job? Making yourself over as a hardened job-hunting machine.
Victoria Secret has figured this out. She’s still in college at UCLA, but an up-and-coming striver, hustling to land a position in the entertainment industry. She has interned with Sony, worked pro bono one year for Walt Disney Outreach and spends nights thinking up slogans and jingles for the Bruin Ad Team, UCLA’s student run advertising team.
Secret is a skilled networker. She e-mails everyone she knows or has ever known who is still in the labor force, letting them know her talents and job interests. And she hands out business cards during her part-time job as a campus sales rep for a PC company.
Secret reviews her resume every month. You should too. “It’s a constant work in progress, like your life.”
Getting hired is all about doggedness, focus and learning to leverage contacts. No one gets anything worthwhile in the 2008 United States of America without being able to call in favors. If you haven’t got faint acquaintances who can assist in getting your foot in the door somewhere, this country is a grim place. If you’re not a persuasive bootlick, your prospects are nil.
You’ve got to throw yourself out there, reaching for any hands or legs there are to be grasped. If you can’t do that, you’ll face rejection again and again.
Here are several things you should do:
Post your resume on-line
You should buy high-quality paper and fresh ink for your printer. In these desperate days, some employers want to have the feel of a good piece of bond in their hands even as they’re tossing it into the trash in favor of the name of someone passed to them by a co-worker or superior. In the meantime, accept that there are virtues to going digital — those being that it’s easy, fast and puts you in a nice position of being immediately accessible, along with the 250 million other people who posted their resumes on-line.
Monster.com, for example, lists hundreds of thousands of jobs in virtually every category and works with 90 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies. To sift them, you’d have to be a machine. And while you are not as capable as such a machine, you must strive to be as machine-like as possible in your on-line search for a job. If you cannot be a ruthless job-hunting machine, you will fail and entropy — the dissolving of everything into nothing — will invade your life.
Other on-line sites target specific fields like jobsforandinmoneymoneymoney.com focusing on accounting and financialization services, annoyingcomputerjobs.com on the obvious, and opportunityknocksbutnotforyou.org, for employment at subsistence wages in the world of nonprofits.
Since there are so many resumes on-line you have about as good a chance at landing something decent as winning a raffle. Have you ever won anything worthwhile in a raffle? That gift certificate to Macy’s doesn’t count.
Apply directly to a company, on-line and off
Many companies post opening on their websites, but responding blind could land your application in a black hole, says Rory Kaplatt, founder of Rory Kaplatt & Associates, a Pasadena search firm. Do it the old-fashioned way: “Get the name of someone and write to that person.”
Everyone knows corporate office-workers and administrators look forward to getting unsolicited mail from desperate people they don’t know. You can check the company’s dumpster for your cover letter and resume a couple of days after you mailed it, if you’re job searching locally. This will allow you to informally keep tabs on the progress of your search. The technique is called “dumpster diving.”
Tap the hidden job-market — plead with your friends
Tell relatives, friends, friends of friends, trusted colleagues — everyone you meet during the day’s travels. Consider hiring a spambot to broadcast your need for a job. Maybe you can even get a job as a spam bot. Now more than ever, blog software employs special visual authentication traps. And so there’s a great need for jobs in which people work in a windowless room, for almost nothing, logging onto blogs, about five or six a minute, to manually upload spam and sales pitches into the comments section.
Anyway, you’re on a job hunt and only by being a ruthless machine will you succeed. For all the sweep of the Internet, only a machine-like focus will do. You must scour the Internet and shakedown your friends, even at the risk of alienating them. If you don’t know about a position, you can’t apply for it. And if you can’t find that job, your friends and everyone else will not want to know you, anyway. When you reach that critical point, which will be soon, your job search will collapse into a black hole. And after six months in the black hole of failed job search, you will be hardcore unemployable.
So you see why you must always be a ruthless job-searching machine. Do not flinch or shirk in this duty.
Being a ruthless job-searching machine worked for Diana. She started with a computer search to build a list of companies where she might want to work and wrote directly to people at each specifying the type of job she hoped to find. You can imagine how that went. The employers didn’t have any openings, but her job-hunting machine routine made such an impression that one eventually found a place for her. The 20-something Los Angeles woman doesn’t want to use her full name because that job wasn’t really a great job. In fact, she’s out of that job and hunting for a new one and if someone sees her name on-line in one of the firms she’s targetting, it won’t be good for the image.
Polish your resume — burnish your credentials, everyone else does
Putting your best self into pixels is a craft “that has to be mastered,” says Richard Bolles, author of the job-hunter’s bible, “Your Arbeit Will Set Your Free.” Job-hunting first-timers and veterans can find plenty of resume tips in the book, as well as on major job search sites. You should be spending at least two hours each day reading up, but in case you can’t get there today, here are some rules of thumb:
1. Be specific. Instead of saying “worked in a retail setting at the strip mall,” try “trained and supervised ten employees, one of whom went on to be a doctor, and handled payroll and purchasing in a firm with annual sales of $20 million.” No one can check or know how much places in strip malls pass in cash or if your co-workers were actually high school drop-outs and community college students.
2. One size does not fit all. Employers expect your resume to clearly show why you fit their specific opening, even if they don’t know what they want in an employee. This presents you with a dilemma. To be successful, you must be a ruthless resume-reworking machine, re-editing your vitals for finicky people whose nature you can only make wild guesses about. As crushing as it sounds, for every job application that you make, you must make a custom rewrite of your resume.
3. Typos or grammatical errors will route your resume into the trash. On the other hand, consider a rigorously spell-checked and elegantly composed resume in the hands of a prospective employer. Think of the e-mails you’ve received from your older college-educated acquaintances now in the corporate workplace. Recall the communications you occasionally get from said-to-be-important people in corporate America at your blog. Now do you really think having a resume that’s grammatical and well written is going to help that much? Come now, it could just as well have the opposite effect, pissing off a reader who gets it into their head you’re probably one of those who thinks they’re smarter than everyone else. So go ahead, make some mistakes. It’s all headed for the trash anyway.
Prepare for the interview — and brush your teeth
Spend time on the company’s website, even if it’s unusable. Check out their annual report and commit to memory the pack of lies that passes for their page of recent press releases. Be prepared to explain why you want the job and when asked what your biggest fault is as a worker, be able to convincingly explain how youve made it into your strongest asset, even though it’s not true. Try to convey the impression that you would give up any prospects for a social life outside work hours and that you might possibly even break the law, if that’s what is necessary to get that job done.
Be sure you come to the interview in a good-looking car or SUV. Make sure it’s clean and shiny. Everyone in America judges the worth of others, whether they admit it or not, by the size and condition of their vehicles. Employers are no different. If you have to, lease a car you can’t hope to afford. You can always declare bankruptcy and get hopelessly in arears later.
Shake hands with any prospective employer. Extend your arm, grasp the hand of the person you are greeting firmly but not crushingly. Don’t go limp. And don’t, don’t, don’t have a sweaty palm. Dry your hand thoroughly with some tissue paper before the interview.
Final resort: Study to become a public example
This involves emulating what some people do in the cities of Europe and Pakistan, environs where there are lots of young men, children of immigrants, who have no realistic hope of bettering their life.
Start hanging around on websites which cater to the distribution of texts advocating violent overthrow. Download all the texts on making poisons you can find on the Internet. Add some more on improvised home-made explosives.