I want you to want me

Maybe you remember the song.  Cheap Trick sang it.

I want you to want me.

I need you to need me.

I'd love you to love me.

In Maslow's Hierarchy of Need, this falls into the 'Love/belonging' category.  (Yes, 'respect by others' is in the next category up, but 'respect' and 'want' are very different things.)

The only needs that are more critical are the basic physiological needs (air, food, water, etc.) and physical safety.  The pyramid on wikipedia shows 'employment' as an element of physical safety.  I didn't remember that, but I guess it makes sense--without employment you can't meet the physiological needs for long.

Cheap Trick's song was clearly meant between lovers.  Perhaps the initial spark of romance had died.  Like many popular songs, the singer is expressing his desire for sex and his willingness to do whatever it takes to earn it.  But these lyrics reach past sex and apply to the inner heart longing for connection and acceptance.  Wanting to be wanted is a common feeling that applies in many types of relationships (most of which are not sexual.)

I talk with many job seekers.  This emotion applies here, as well.

Getting laid off is often an intensely personal event.  No matter the circumstances, you feel rejected.  Even if you understand the circumstances and it really wasn't personal, it feels personal.  I've felt this myself.  I hear it in other people's voices, and in the way they tell their stories.

For many job seekers the next job is less about getting another paycheck and more about being wanted again.  The paycheck is a safe topic that you can talk about.  But for most of us, the need to be needed is felt more strongly.  And the inverse is true.  The feeling of being wanted is missed more than the paycheck.

When I think about the projects I'm doing, like theHiringSurvey and perhaps the Whatever company, I think about communicating to people that they are wanted.  It's important.

Craig at the HCBC job club often talks about getting stuck.  He talks about anger.  He talks about forgiveness and moving on.  He talks about feeling rejected.  But there isn't a shortcut that I have found for feeling wanted.  You can fake it for a while.  But at some level it seems to be a wound that simply won't heal until a person feels wanted again.

That's one of the things that brings me back to the Whatever company idea.  There are paychecks involved.  But it can also heal that wound and help people get unstuck.

Dirt digging on Goldman Sachs

Barry at the Big Picture provided a link to a very controversial article.  I have never read McClatchey's new before, so I don't know their reputation.  The article passes the sniff test--the writer clearly doesn't like GS, but his reasons seem to be based upon actual injustices performed.  If he has a personal axe to grind that didn't come through to me.

The author attempts to prove that GS knew that the CDOs were garbage destined to implode before they sold them to their clients.  Then they hedged them in a way that would let GS profit when the products they had just sold tanked.  If provable, this is certainly a violation of basic professional ethics.  It ought to be illegal, but I don't know the law here.  Certainly if I were a GS client who had lost a bundle on CDOs I would be out for blood.  I'm guessing that it is only a matter of time before a class-action suit is filed against GS by its customers.

The FED and Treasury failed the taxpayers and GS's clients.  Let's see if the SEC and courts can find justice.

theHiringSurvey.com Presentation

I was able to speak to the Job Club at Hill Country Bible Club this morning.  Here's a video of my presentation.

There were about 80-100 people in the audience.

I haven't spoken to a group like this for years.  I thought I had removed 'uh' from my vocabulary.  I guess I need more practice.

Please take the survey and share the survey.  http://www.thehiringsurvey.com

Thank you , Craig, for giving me the opportunity to speak to the club.

Father Abram

Sunday school (Adult Bible Fellowship) on Sunday morning was about Abram and the Abrahamic Covenant.  I was really struck by the fact that God made this an unconditional covenant.  That means that God didn't put any qualifications on it.  God simply said, "I'm going to bless the whole world through your family."

It's almost as if Abram couldn't even stop God from doing it.  In most of God's other covenants with people there are conditions that God lays down before the people will receive God's blessing.  Sometimes there are punishments listed for failing to live up to their end of the bargain.

It made me wonder why God did not do any of that in Abram's case.  Abram certainly sinned and made some mistakes along the way.  But the mistakes that he made were not serious enough to threaten God's work.

Did God simply know this in advance?  Maybe God just decided that this project was too important to let Abram fail.  Or maybe He just knew that Abram didn't need the threat in order to be faithful.

Whatever God's reasonings, it seems clear that Abram was the sort of person who would remain faithful without the threats.  Wow.  Think about that for a minute.  Abram was willing to leave his home and follow God's direction with little evidence and little knowledge of God.  Scripture does not indicate that Abram was a simpleton.  Abram reasoned out the situation and decided to trust God, over and over.

If only I could be so faithful.

Who matters most, teachers or students?

This is a sad story, no matter how you look at it.  The school was a perennial failure.  Something had to be done.  I am greatly impressed that the school board and superintendent had the determination to do something.  I'm not positive that this was the right answer.  But it shows that the top priority is the children, and not the teachers or their union.

I certainly feel for the teachers who are being laid off.  Up to half of them might be re-hired, if their unions will allow them to go back to work.

I understand the necessity of unions to negotiate on behalf of workers.  But this becomes less and less relevant as we deal with more and more professional workers.

The teachers have to accept some of the blame for the school's performance.  Insisting on $90/hour for the additional work it would take to get back on track is not how one should behave when accepting responsibility.

I fear this story is not over.  And I fear that it will be repeated.  Lawsuits and counter-lawsuits.  The union may well boycott the school or district.  But this is clearly a watershed moment for the teachers' union.  They need to think very clearly about their next steps.  They don't really want to see non-union teachers take over the school and improve performance.  That would be the worst possible outcome for the union.  But I wouldn't be surprised at all to see exactly that outcome.

Too much law

Ignorance of the law is not supposed to be an excuse.  But we have breached the point where an average person could not possibly figure out which laws apply to them.

This lawyer makes the case quite well, and gives some great ideas about what we should do about it.

Convergence of video games, advertising, and life achievements

I like to think I'm a futurist.  This guy is ahead of me.  If you are curious about what our daily lives will be like in the near future, watch this 30-minute video.  Brilliant, and not as scary as I had expected.

Unemployment idea

The people who are supposed to know such things are forecasting many years of high unemployment.  High unemployment is a huge drag on the economy.  Unemployed people don't buy stuff.  Stuff being bought is the driver of our economy.  Unemployed people can't make their mortgage payments.  Missed mortgage payments hurt the banks.  This is a troubling vicious cycle.

The top 1% of the US population now gets about 60% of the income in the country.  That is a massive concentration of wealth.  This is a social problem.  But it may also be a great opportunity.

We need to get people back to work.  And we have a small group of people with the resources to hire them, if only they will.  So how do we enable the rich to employ the unemployed?

Traditionally employment involves having an idea for a product or service, forming a company, managing a company, etc., etc., etc....  I've done some of that, and I don't really blame people for not wanting to do it.  So what if we shortcut that?

Let's form a single non-profit company.  Let's hire unemployed people to build and manage the company.  Let's offer basic benefits, like health insurance, and low-but-livable salaries.  Let's put up a website where anyone can suggest projects for the company to work on.  We'll do make-work, if we have to.  But it would be better if we could do work that would actually benefit society.

It will be a non-profit company.  Any services provided would be either no-cost or low-cost to the recipient of the services.  Any products created would be given free, or virtually free.

We would have to employ a management staff to hire people and administer the business.  We would need project managers to oversee the (probably) large number of small projects being done.  All of the work would be fully documented, so anyone and everyone could see that the workers were doing what they were asked to do.

Clean up that vacant lot and build a park.
Repair those old people's houses.
Tutor children after school.
Help poor people apply for assistance programs.
Provide free after-school care for single parents.
Whatever, wherever, whenever.

Obviously the company would be donation-driven.  Donors would get priority in voting for projects, and would get whatever amount of progress reporting that they wanted to see.

As the economy rights itself, sometime in the future, the workers will start finding better-paying jobs.  The company will definitely shrink, but depending upon the level of need it might not ever go away.

It would be something like a Goodwill for people who are fully employable, but who just can't find jobs right now.

What do you think?

What's next?

Yesterday I asked what's the next after environmentalism.  I think I figured it out.  Maybe.  I need a name for it.

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The planet's climate changes.  Even if all humans died today, and all traces of human life were magically erased,  the planet would still continue to get warmer.  Until its natural cycles decided it was time to cool, and then it would cool.

Even if we reached the goal of becoming carbon and warming neutral, the planet would continue to warm and cool.  We don't know how warm it will get, even if we completely stop contributing to the warming.  Becoming warming neutral is the wrong goal.  Even if we win that battle we could lose the war.

Stop naively assuming that we can survive the natural maximum and minimum temperatures on this planet!

Curb your human-centric egotism.  This planet doesn't care if we live or die.

Our war is a fight for survival on a planet that only temporarily supports our species.

This planet has maximum and minimum temperatures outside of the ranges for sustaining human life.  This planet has natural life-cycles that will kill us if we do not prepare to survive through them.

We cannot bio-engineer the planet to stop the changes.  Perhaps we can reach the level of technology to bio-engineer the top and bottom of the planet's temperature range to fit within our range, but that seems very unlikely.  Perhaps we can learn to draw down the naturally increasing salinity of the seas to stop the next massive sea-life extinction, but probably not.

We are the only thing we can change.  We need to focus on expanding our survival range.  Minimizing our negative impact might be helpful.  But that won't save us.

We have to study the planet in a much more organized fashion--mature from alchemists to chemists.  We need to understand the maximum and minimum temperatures the time-tables for when the planet will get outside of our temperature range.  We have to learn to live without sea-life.  We have to learn what else we can eat and breath.

Then we have to develop systems and processes to survive those periods.  Probably we are hundreds or thousands of years from the next extinction point, but there is hundreds or thousands of years of work that must be done before that point.

The simple fact is that we don't know how far we are from the next natural extinction point.  The only thing we know is that the light at the end of that tunnel is a train, and we will not survive if we do not focus on the right goals.

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What do I call this?

One more Global Warming post

The end is near for the warm mongers.  The Wall Street Journal has flipped and become skeptical of the science behind this movement.  Major British papers, the The Daily Mail and London Times are both now openly skeptical and ridiculing of the warm mongers.

I'm tiring of this subject.  It's today's news, and I'm much more interested in tomorrow's news.  I've spent a little time thinking through how the rest of the collapse will play out.  This is interesting, because there are opportunities that can be seized.

Advocacy Opportunities
Right now there are millions of dollars pouring in to climate change (warm monger) think tanks and consultancies.  That will dry up very soon.  All of those donors will be angry and disillusioned.  Someone could sing the right song and build out the next environmental care group and sweep up those millions.  They just have to be very careful in how they talk about man-made global warming.

I doubt that will happen.  That money will go to some cause other than environmentalism.  Certainly some money will go there, but the bulk will go elsewhere.  I wish I knew where.

The Next Environmentalism
There are many companies that are retooling and shifting their product lines to be more environmentally friendly.  Much of that is driven by public opinion on global warming.  Some of it is also based upon reduction of pollution.  Some of it is based upon energy independence.  But those two drivers were unable to get the ball really rolling until the warm mongers began their hyped-up scare tactics and well-funded media blitz.  Without the support of the global warming scare people will soon forget why we are working so hard to be environmentally friendly.

There is an opportunity for someone to remind them--similar to the above opportunity.  But what I think will happen is that the pendulum will swing away from environmentalism for a while.  So there is opportunity for an entirely new issue to capture the public's attention.  What will be the new environmentalism?

That's a great question.  Fiscal responsibility might be the new environmentalism.  Worker's rights might be it. Nationalism might be it.  Employment is the biggest issue facing the US today, so some form of employment guarantees is a good guess.  Inflation is going to be the next great challenge facing the US, so that's a good guess, too.

Product Fallout
Electric cars, wind turbines, and solar power will all have to find a new reason to exist. Without global warming scaremongering they are all dramatically less attractive products.  They are here now, with lots of people relying on those jobs.  They will be the last to admit that the global warming scare was a hoax.  But when they do they will blow out their marketing budgets trying to find a boogeyman.  My guess is that they will choose energy independence.  That's good, because energy independence is a good thing.

But I don't think that the American public will buy it.  Sarah Palin seems to do well with her crowd.  But even after the global warming hoax is put to bed the anti-Sarah crowd will never get on that bandwagon, if for no other reason than because Sarah and her crowd are there.  Can you imagine a Prius commercial fear-mongering about Arab oil power?

So I am afraid that many of these good products will ultimately lose out.  There was already a great contraction coming, as the time neared to pick a winner between the competing green energy sources.  I'm afraid that will come much faster now.  Few green power products will survive.  It's winner-take-all, and the next great innovation will be the winner.  I wish I knew who that would be: solar, wind, hydrogen fuel cell.  If I had to put money on it I would go with hydrogen fuel cells, but that's just a guess.  This little nuclear reactor looks like it has legs.

Political Fallout
I would love to say that the long-term advocates of global warming will face consequences for their misjudgment.  But that's never happened before in the political realm, so why think it will happen now.  The politicians who once advocated cap-and-trade and other global-warming prevention policies will simply stop talking about it and it will be forgotten.

I would love to say that politicians will be slower on the uptake and more cautious next time.  Again, I can't imagine that happening now when it has never happened before.  The political class will continue to be the same self aggrandizing sheep they have always been.

I do think that the fiscal problems that the capitalists have made do open the door for socialists of all stripes to gain some ground.  But that's not because of global warming, really.  But the socialists who attempt to gain ground will point to global warming scaremongering as one of the reasons why capitalists cannot be trusted--as if they needed a second reason.  But, ultimately, I think that American's are too independent a bunch to go for much official socialism.

If the libertarians could construct an attractive platform and leadership then they could make a lot of hay right now.  Again, not because of the global warming fiasco, but in part because of it.  "Don't give Washington enough power to do this again."  But that won't happen.  Attractiveness and libertarianism seem to be mutually exclusive.

Environmental Fallout
Pollution is a real problem that has never gotten the attention it deserves.  It will get even less for the next decade or so.  That's a shame.

Climate does change, it just takes a lot longer than the warm mongers have been claiming.  And human activity is not one of the principle causes.  Humanity needs to spend real scientific effort to understand climate change and figure out how to better cope with it.  That has now been set back by at least a hundred years.  That's a shame.  But that's the problem of a much later generation.

theHiringSurvey.com is now live!

The surveys have launched.  There is much to do still, to get people to come take the surveys.  But the first big hurdle has been cleared.

If you haven't taken the survey yet, please click through and take it:
http://www.thehiringsurvey.com

Thank you!

H.R. 3149: Equal Employment for All Act

Representative Steve Cohen has introduced this bill which would make it illegal for companies to run a credit check on a candidate for employment or promotion.

Right now this is a common practice.  There is a little merit in this practice.  The thinking is that it is kind of like a pre-crime criminal background check--someone with a very bad credit rating might be more likely to steal from the company.  I don't think that the connection has ever been proven.  But maybe I can see the connection--or at least the line of reasoning.  A few years ago when I was a hiring manager and the economy was pretty strong, this seemed like a good idea to me.

Now I'm a prospective employee and the economy is terrible.  My credit rating is still excellent.  But it won't be for much longer.  It's not my fault that the economy is terrible.  But I'm about to get shut out of the job market.

I'm working on a project to help people find better jobs faster.  But lots of them have been laid off for a while and their credit rating has taken a hit.  This is about to become a self-fulfilling prophecy and make it impossible for the job market to pick back up because all of the prospective employees fail the credit rating screening.

This bill would be a great benefit to unemployed people.  It would add some risk back to companies.  But I think that the benefits far outweigh the costs.

The bill is stuck in the House Financial Services committee.  It's been there for months.  Click through here to see the members of this committee.  Then if your representative is on that committee contact him/her and express your desire to see this bill get out of committee and passed into law.  I would suggest a simple letter like this:

H.R.3149, the Equal Employment for All Act,  is currently before the House Financial Services, of which you are a member.  This bill would significantly help a large number of Americans who are already having a very hard time through little or no fault of their own.  It might also benefit some fools or even a few crooks.  But the good that it would do for very many people far outweighs any negative side effects.  Please take action to get this bill to out of committee and on to the House floor for a vote.

The site above has links to maps so you can figure out who your representative is, if you don't know.  There are 5 Texas representatives on the committee, but mine is not.

Update on 3/2/10: It is being reported that some states are taking up the idea of banning credit checks for job seekers.  I'm not really optimistic of this happening, but it would help.