Here’s the weird part though-

Four in 10 hiring managers said they always contacted workers who applied for made-up jobs. Forty-five percent said they sometimes contacted those job seekers. Among companies that contacted applicants, 85% report interviewing the person.

Does that part make sense to anyone?

This strikes me less as fraud and more as a way to stay open to talent that you may not need immediately but still want to be able to add to your organization, in an era when basically nobody sends unsolicited resumes anymore. Like, maybe you don’t have a project in need of a Whatever Specialist right now, but it’s a field your company works in, and if a really exceptional Whatever Specialist is on the market, you don’t want to miss the opportunity to bring them on.

It’s the Chicago mob all over again!

Federal authorities raided a home belonging to Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao early Thursday as part of a California investigation that included a search of at least two other houses, officials said… Agents also carried out searches about three miles to the south at two homes owned by members of the politically influential Duong family that owns the recycling company Cal Waste Solutions, the Chronicle said. The firm has been investigated over campaign contributions to Thao and other elected city officials, the local news outlet Oaklandside reported in 2020.

Their numbers are declining, but it’s leaving primarily those who are most psychotically zealous in their commitment to fundamentalism and Christian Dominionism. Those few who don’t toe the line completely are either finding themselves pushed out of their communities, or their communities are having to make adaptations to allow mutually-incompatible views of theology to coexist, to at least temporarily.

So far a fair number have actually come out against the verdict, including Lindsay Graham… which makes me think there are a number of Republican legislators who own guns and enjoy partaking in a little nose candy from time to time, as well.

The entire history of the nation of Israel is basically proving the axiom that “hurt people hurt people,” but on a geopolitical scale.

North County was previously where all the middle class white people went after fleeing the urban core. Then as more African American families moved in to get away from urban decay, the white population moved to suburbs south and west of the city. This isn’t civil rights history, either – it’s been an ongoing process as recently as the 90s. My (white) dad grew up in Blackjack, just a short ways from Ferguson, and his parents only moved out of the area around 1995. When the unrest around Michael Brown’s death kicked off, he turned on the evening news to see the supermarket where my grandmother used to buy groceries going up in flames.

I don’t think it would make much of a difference. Absent Reagan, the Republican nominee would have been Bush Sr., and he likely would have won in the general – Carter was wildly unpopular due to persistent stagflation, the Iranian oil crisis, and the related hostage crisis. The GOP could have nominated an expired jar of mayonnaise and still won the election, and then done most of the same things anyway – Reagan was infamously more a charismatic figurehead than a technocrat, and visibly going senile in his second term. The conservative cabal moving the levers behind the scene would have been largely the same.

As ever, the Great Man theory of history tends to be more hagiography than fact, and it’s most informative to look at larger socio-cultural trends.

And like so many things in modern life, you can lay at least part of the blame on Reagan. He broke the air traffic controllers’ union in order to force them to accept longer hours, lower pay, and brutal shift schedules – look up “The Rattler” sometime, and then realize that the person directing traffic at airport that thousands of people are arriving and departing from every hour probably hasn’t slept for more than a couple hours in the last three days.

Ed Zitron has suggested that Altman is good at wooing VC capital and developing a cult of personality, but not particularly good at showing returns or even at staying focused on a task. I can easily believe that if you’re not the sort to fall in line with the corporate religion he’d promoted, that you’d find yourself being ostracized and subjected to abuse.

My suspicion/understanding of what went down is that the board wanted him out for funneling money to undisclosed side projects and failing to deliver on more central priorities, and then his personality cult revolted. Things may be turning against him internally, though, especially if successive iterations of their core product don’t live up to Altman’s techno-messianic predictions of its capabilities and/or financials sag to the point that having a job there ceases to guarantee entry into the Bay Area’s financial upper crust.

This is what’s actually meant by the “invisible hand.” They pushed prices past what the market was willing to bear, and lost sales as people made do without. Now they’re adjusting prices back down, because it makes more sense to accept a smaller margin and make it up in volume. It’s a textbook example of the demand curve in action.

When market-based systems work, they work fairly elegantly. It’s the cases where they break down that I get concerned with.

If I recall, it’s between 3x and 10x as expensive to build buried lines versus overhead, tending more towards the high end of that number in existing built-out neighborhoods where there’s a lot of existing stuff in the right-of-way that needs to be removed or worked around somehow.

The real problem that folks have been bringing up is for-profit electric utilities ignoring line maintenance and instead just pocketing as profit the funds that should have paid for that work. Lots of folks in my area have noted that the utility used to regularly trim trees near the lines, but that work basically stopped after it merged into a larger regional power company. Even when people would call to report branches basically draped over the lines, the utility would ignore the issue.

For what it’s worth, I live in a relatively small pocket where power is provided by a county public utility, and the outages in our area were much less severe and power was restored to all but one or two people within a day. The utility board is far from perfect, but in this case they performed significantly better than their for-profit peer around us.

I’ve got the good fortune to have an >800 credit score, and even the offers I’ve seen from “status symbol” card issuers have had bonkers-high interest even when the Fed was holding the prime rate close to zero. The lowest I’ve ever seen was still around 15%, and even at that “low” rate you’d have to be truly desperate to carry a balance. Even unsecured personal loans tend to carry interest rates at half of what a credit card offers.

Okay, body slams are out, but what about The People’s Elbow?

Water and sewer are overwhelmingly public utilities in the US. This is more a case of small-time bureaucratic incompetence than corporate avarice – think along the lines of your grandpa writing the default Wifi password on the front of the router because he can’t remember it and doesn’t know how to change it, except Grandpa is in charge of a rural water district, and the router is the control system for the chlorine treatment.

Where water service is expensive in the US it’s usually because decades-old infrastructure built to support far-flung suburban development are starting to fall apart, and there was never a plan to pay for replacement. Some places are also being required by the EPA to separate ancient combined storm and sanitary sewers, which basically entails a complete replacement of the sewers at a cost of billions. Infrastructure is expensive to maintain, especially if you spend a few decades ignoring it first.

Unfortunately, recent Supreme Court rulings would seem to put the kibosh on my “the Confederacy is coming from inside the house” theory of outlawing the GOP as a whole for seditious conspiracy.

I used to have a coworker whose daughter was in competitive cheer. It’s like any youth competition – the parents can lose their goddamn minds over it. If there was a chance somebody could DQ a competing team, or perhaps open up a spot on a team by narcing on one of the current members, somebody is gonna do it.

I tried using ChatGPT to distill my LinkedIn profile down to a summary paragraph for a marketing resume (what gets included with a RFQ response when a design or engineering form is pursuing a project) and everything it spat out was worse than what I had already written and wasn’t happy with. Ultimately I lifted a phrase or two from ChatGPT’s output, but it didn’t do much to save me time or improve the quality of my copy.

Given that hunting is a very common pastime in the US, and that hunting rifles are statistically the firearms least likely to be used in a homicide, I think you’d find that information to be a pretty useless outlier, on the level of asking about bow or fencing foil ownership.

Don’t look at the pile of old phones and laptop batteries that’s been sitting in the trunk of my car for the last month. I tried to get rid of them at a community hazardous waste event, but the computer recyclers didn’t show, and they’re just gathering dust at the moment…