06.20.11
The Empire’s Dog Feces: Many job openings for bombing paupers remotely
The structural thing, at Newsweek, increasingly used as a rationalization to stop worrying about massive unemployment. It’s all the fault of stupid workers with atrophied, obsolete skills.
There are plenty of jobs and employers can’t fill them fast enough:
[One] survey for the National Association of Manufacturers in 2009, near the recession’s nadir, found that a third of companies still faced shortages. These were largest for engineers and scientists and among aerospace, defense and biotechnology firms.
Arms manufacturing and bombing others in our detached wars is bully.
Newsweek allows a little doubt to creep in at the end. Won’t corporate America take a chance? Brother, could you spare a dollar?
There is no instant cure for today’s job mismatch, but it might ease if America’s largest companies were a little bolder. Surely many of them — enjoying strong profits — could make a small gamble that, by providing more training for workers, they might actually do themselves and the country some good.
We know the answer to that.
Readers will remember that last week Jeff Immelt of GE, he of the Prez’s job council, recommended pushing tourism — America’s a great place to visit (!) — and community college.
Anyway, where are the dependable jobs of good wage?
Obvious, really, if you read the New York Times. Border patrol and building more robots to bomb the have-nots of the world.
The US government and Pentagon successfully removed the citizenry for the equation for war. That has made the market stable.
Now the national security apparatus is involved, practically speaking, mostly in money-making and plinking off a wide variety of paupers it finds around the globe. And only very stupid people believe that killing scruffs in AfPak or Yemen or Libya, no matter how bad some of the individuals may be, does anything to defend basic freedoms and promote American value. (Yes, dronifying the pantywaists really has done the trick.)
The mightiest military in the world is for wealth-generation as well as plutocracy and toady protection schemes, from which no fruits are generally shared. While it’s out picking off bad guys and civilians too close to the action, the stuff at home worth defending blows slowly away in the wind.
From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones, the Cessna-sized workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far less widely known are the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it.
The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones …
There’s the official designated expert cheerleader on drones, Peter W. Singer — Brookings man, to vouchsafe something meant to sound clever and wonderful:
The Pentagon has asked Congress for nearly $5 billion for drones next year, and by 2030 envisions ever more stuff of science fiction: “spy flies??? equipped with sensors and microcameras to detect enemies, nuclear weapons or victims in rubble. Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Wired for War,??? a book about military robotics, calls them “bugs with bugs.???
Had to throw the “victims in rubble” part in to make the technology sound a little like it’s making the world a better place.
If you’re structurally unemployed and not able to get into arms manufacturing, perhaps you aren’t leveraging your iKit and cyberpersona enough.
At Mashable, no link, a consultant tells what you must do:
1. Leverage Your Social Graph
2. Use Augmented Reality and Job Search Apps
And don’t don’t don’t be short on Klout —
In today’s world, not only do you need strong hard and soft skills, but you need to develop online influence.Online influence is measured in how many connections you have, who those connections are (and how influential they are), who and how many people are sharing your content and backlinking to your website and more. Klout.com, a site that measures online influence and gives you a “Klout score??? … [Klout, incidentally, seems to be nothing more than an elaborate parasite economy app for digging into your life on Facebook or Twitter. If you don’t consent to logging onto it through these accounts, you can’t use it.]
5. Turn Yourself Into an Advertisement
Dan Schawbel is the author of Me 2.0 and the founder of Millennial Branding, a full-service personal branding agency. He’s spoken about personal branding at Google …
Eleventy-thousand three hundred six and a buck two eighty “like” it on Facebook.