Since it’s pledge drive time yet again, PBS member station WTVS has the usual baby-boomer-oriented “pledge programming” slated for the next few weeks on channel 56.1. Meanwhile 56.2 becomes even more repetitive (i.e. less informative) than usual. One presentation they have been treating us to a lot is the US Chamber of Commerce’s Illicit: The Dark Trade. Another is The Street Stops Here, jointly sponsored by Don Eberly‘s National Fatherhood Institute, Jeanne Allen‘s Center for Education Reform and an organization called The Clapham Group. Perhaps the people who make editorial decisions at PBS think that if they run enough decidedly right-of-center programming, they’ll be spared the budget axe. It would seem a reasonable proposition, but it seems that the meme campaign to paint PBS/NPR/CPB as a left wing extremist organization is already in full force. The public broadcasters, like the Democrats (even the most moderate of Democrats) will be red-baited and branded as extremists no matter what they do. The purpose of the campaign of aggressive repetition is to convince people that “center is the new left,” that is, that ideas considered middle-of-the road a generation ago are and should be considered left-of-center today. The negotiation of what counts as “middle of the road” is a far more high-stakes political outcome than an election cycle. The commercial media are obviously on the side of the political right. That the Democratic Party refuses to participate in the tug-of-war over the “center” demonstrates that the conservative (DLC and/or “Blue” Dog) faction of the Democratic Party has an uncontested controlling interest in the party.

The excellent blog “Good communication skills” sucks pointed me to an ongoing debate on Debatewise about whether “companies should provide alternative interview methods,” or alternatives to the job interview for the selection process. The points for the affirmative and negative logged so far are as follows:

All the Yes points

1. Doesn’t always suit the job.
2. Can’t get a realistic impression of a person in such a short space of time.
3. Unsuitable for employable people with Asperger’s Syndrome and similar conditions.
4. Relies too heavily on vacancy details.

All the No points

1. Would create confusion.
2. Misses the point of an interview.
3. A significant number of studies reveal that the first impression is in fact the last impression

Now if I ran the world I’d abolish job interviews entirely. The question here is a little narrower; whether there should be an alternate screening method offered. I see job interviews as the second line of defense of Fortress Employment against the General Public. The first line of defense is of course ‘networking,’ which I define as the practice of working with rather than against the fact that who you know is more important than what you know. The object of the networking game is to make friends with people who have the authority to hire (or to cut purchase orders if your game is sales rather than job hunting), or at least to become of friend-of-a-friend of such key decision-makers. Another goal of networking is to get unpublished information about where openings are. The fact that most information of this type is unpublished in the first place is itself proof that the criteria of employers are largely other-than-meritocratic. The need to be socially connected to the employer itself in order even to find one’s way to the applicant pool demonstrates that employers want to hire people they know; basically nepotism. Whether a vacancy is announced publicly or not, there will almost always be an interview at some point. This puts on display your personality characteristics, social style, race, sex, approximate age, and I suppose the firmness (or dryness?) of your handshake. The idea behind networking, which is to say keeping vacancies out of the want ads, seems to be “hire the people you know.” The idea behind interviews, with the implied personality screening and social screening, is “hire the people you like.”

While generally pretty assertive about my non-Objectivism, I must admit I owe a debt of gratitude to Ayn Rand for popularizing the phrase ‘package dealing.’ One textbook example of this practice which is out standing in the field is the US Chamber of Commerce’s funding of PBS’ broadcast of National Geographics’s hour-long production titled Illicit: The Dark Trade. Basically the terms ‘illicit trade’ and ‘black market’ are used interchangeably. These terms, we are told, cover everything from intellectual property infringement to illegal drugs to human trafficking. The centerpiece of the film is a truly heartbreaking story about hospital patient fatalities in Panama because of some cough syrup tainted with toxic ingredients because some overly-entrepreneurial Chinese firm substituted some cheap-but-poisonous compound for glycerine. Sounds to me not like not so much the consequences of counterfeiting proprietary products as the consequences of information about the supply chain being treated as proprietary. The problem is too much proprietary.

“How long that will take I can’t tell you, but I don’t expect it to be very long, because as Watson begins replacing all those professionals in the job market, what do you think those experts are going to be doing? I know what I would be doing… making improvements in the open source versions of Watson to put the company that sacked me so the CEO could keep making a bonus out of business.”—valkyrie ice

“I work you fucking bastards. Isn’t that bad enough for whoever thought of this question to enact this farce, asking a wage slave to describe his work. 8 hours, for life to be expended in Hegelian freedom of choice, for the profit of a fucking wanker”—Anand ‘droog’ Kumar

“Cooperativity is fundamental … There is no dictator in cell regulation, no first among equals, no master regulator, no top-down system of governance.”—Michel Bauwens

“Where does this belief in ‘only works on the small scale’ come from? Is it based on the belief that people would, if not restrained by the personal effect of direct contact, cheat and hurt each other? If so, then it is only a corollary of the belief in man being innately evil.”—François Tremblay

“The CEO takes 11 of 12 cookies on the plate, then says to the Tea Partier, ‘look out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie.’”—Patricia Welch

“I don’t believe in God. And, dammit, I live like I don’t. There’s nothing wrong with that.”—Hemant Mehta

“The most oppressive governments people face are corporate governments, and the most tyrannical forms are usually found at work-places and local areas, not at the Federal Government.”—C. Holte

“A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.”—Howard Scott, quoted by Angela Russell

From DTE Energy’s brochure (pdf) on net metering:

How many customers are eligible for net metering?

Net metering is limited to one percent of Detroit Edison’s peak load, or about 100,000 kW. The eligibility is further broken down like this:

* 0.5 percent for units of 20kW and less
* 0.25 percent for units generating between 20kW and 150 kW
* 0.25 percent for units generating more than 150kW

These limits would allow several thousand customers to participate.

The rather low ceiling makes it clear that net metering is something the company opposes. Those of us who would like to follow Freiburg‘s example should expect some serious head-butting, against tens of millions of dollars worth of astroturf.

Competition taken to its logical conclusion is global thermonuclear war. Competition stripped down to its bare essence is three men in a two-man lifeboat. A lot of tools employed in the humyn resources field will try to get you to believe in “cooperation within competition” or other absurdities intended to facilitate the cooptation of cooperation by competition, while what is needed in order to create the humane society is the supplanting of competition by cooperation.

“I have looked at the big four cell providers in the US, but all their websites are just as complicated one compared to the other… it’s as if they don’t want us to know how much exactly things will cost.”&mdashmichelito

“The real problem is the competitive nature of [the] economy across the world. IT and Engineering jobs have disappeared due to outsourcing.”—anonymous

“I think that the idea that economics is not always zero-sum (certainly true) has lead some people, in that sunny American way, to assume that economics is never zero-sum (false, in my estimation).”—Freddie

“Yeah, well, there comes a point where you gotta ask, even if it’s literally true, do you really want to choose to be on the side of someone who would do that kind of shit?”—David Brin

“Simply trying to be an upstanding, independent, individual is not the essence of capitalism any more than being a good person is the essence of Christianity.”—John Madziarczyk

Give a man [sic] a job, and he’ll work for a few weeks. Give a man a killer resume, and he’ll work a few weeks, every few months, over the next few years.

irridian.com appears to be a phishing domain. Their MO appears to be facebook impersonation.