going viral

an ideal employee

From The Atlantic
NOT LONG AGO I was offered work as a quality-control expert with an American company in China I’d never heard of. No experience necessary—which was good, because I had none. I’d be paid $1,000 for a week, put up in a fancy hotel, and wined and dined in Dongying, an industrial city [...]

business as usual

From The Guardian
The poverty of action is inexcusable. The value of outstanding lending by British banks in all currencies is five times our national output – proportionally greater than any comparable country – and is underpinned by a puny amount of pure equity capital; £1 for every £50 lent. As an internal Bank of [...]

D-I-Y

Sweet story here from Wired , though, perhaps a little too wide eyed and gee whiz, when you consider the state of the American economy. But I guess that is their point. America’s demise is really the demise of Fordism and the giant scale, production that entails. This idea, that the individuation [...]

this is one problem that’s not going away

The GFC caught everyone’s attention for a while there, but peak oil is on its way.  Oh Happy Days!
From Jeff Rubin at The Globe and Mail

No one seems to want to acknowledge the inconvenient truth that conventional oil supply (i.e. the type of low-cost fuel you can afford to burn) has not grown since [...]

checkout girl

From The Independent

Supermarkets are veritable treasure troves but unfortunately everything has to be paid for. Sometimes, though, the temptation to steal is just too strong. It’s only human. But if you don’t want to get caught, dear customer, avoid the following ploys, which are all-too-well known [...]

Lunacy

Having already defaced the earth with its eye wearying banality, advertisers are tooling up to take on the cosmos.  Are there no limits to human ingenuity?
It’s one giant leap for robot-kind. New Shadow Shaping technology creates images on the Moon that can be seen from Earth. Robots are used to create several small ridges in [...]

Actor needed for one days work.

from Craigslist
My deceased aunt gave my two kids a Cocker Spaniel a few months back. The dog has been a terror and become overwhelming for me. I am a single father raising two young children. I cannot face telling the kids that the dog must go. I have found a good home for the dog, [...]

The Zombies Have Taken Over the Asylum

Nice piece by Tina Brown in the Daily Beast about the problem with so much of the world of work…
The carnage in media jobs accelerated last week with hundreds getting whacked at Viacom, NBC, Time Inc., and my own esteemed publisher Doubleday. One of the runners-up in the Person of the Year award by the [...]

corporate responsibility

One often hears the big end of town grumbling about government regulation, how it stifles enterprise and the independence that leads to a wealthy society. Whenever you hear this talk just stop for a moment and think about asbestos, or thalidomide or Bhopal.  It was twenty four years ago today that the Union Carbide factory [...]

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