May 2005 – Shortwoman.com

Shorties

Follow up on Real ID, which will make us less secure, create more data about us in large databases that will result in less privacy, and make us more vulnerable to identity theft. This last bit is why it is a big deal that even the best biometrics have a 2% fail rate; if we really give a hoot about “security” and “identification,” then biometric failure means some security guy has to go make sure you are really John Doe, and not some guy with John Doe’s severed thumb.

On education, an interesting way to figure out what is known and how bits of knowledge relate to one another. Also, useful for finding glaring gaps in our understanding.

On jobs, not only does the CEO make more than you, he makes 300 times more than you and the fact that so few jobs have been created means there is intense competition for “entry level” jobs, and in a nation where there are plenty short sticks to go around, the young urban poor get the shortest one of all.

And finally, something for those of you who feel like you’ve been fighting for one entry level job after another for the last few years, a friend of mine has a shirt for you: it says I had a job during the Clinton administration.

The Big Score

Remember 2000? I remember seeing CNBC on the TV at fast food joints, auto mechanics telling me about their stock holdings, and overhearing people discussing the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the next table over dinner. Shortly thereafter, the Dow and Nasdaq began to drop. The Nasdaq is still only at about 40% of the highs hit in 2000.

Here we are five years later. Nobody talks much about their stock portfolio anymore, but we sure do talk about real estate. And no wonder! Broad ownership of real estate is a stated goal of the Bush Administration, and a very successful one at that. It is accepted that home ownership is in general a Good Thing, and I promise to address whether or not it truly is at a later date. However, there is something going on that is not a Good Thing: there are signs that too many people are too heavily leveraged to the housing market.

You may see anecdotal evidence of this in your neighborhood and among people you know. A quarter says you know at least two real estate agents — even if you aren’t in the process of buying a house. Odds are even better that you personally know people who own investment property. And you almost certainly know someone who has either a second mortgage or some kind of special mortgage product that lowers their actual payment to something they can afford to spend every month. At least most of the time.

Now we have people like Paul Krugman telling us that (gulp) it was necessary to create a housing bubble — using the abnormally low interest rates that the Federal Reserve told us would create jobs — to mitigate stock market losses and sustain American spending. Sustaining spending is important because it makes up 2/3 of Gross Domestic Product, the official measure of whether or not the economy is growing and whether or not there is a recession. And there is no question that consumer spending continues to rise. Theoretically, Mr. Krugman points out, this created jobs, or at least meant fewer jobs were lost when the stock bubble burst. Allow me to excerpt a couple of paragraphs, inserting a couple of linked references lest anyone accuse him of misusing statistics:

But although the housing boom has lasted longer than anyone could have imagined, the economy would still be in big trouble if it came to an end. That is, if the hectic pace of home construction were to cool, and consumers were to stop borrowing against their houses, the economy would slow down sharply. If housing prices actually started falling, we’d be looking at a very nasty scene, in which both construction and consumer spending would plunge, pushing the economy right back into recession.

That’s why it’s so ominous to see signs that America’s housing market, like the stock market at the end of the last decade, is approaching the final, feverish stages of a speculative bubble….

Many home purchases are speculative; the National Association of Realtors estimates that 23 percent of the homes sold last year were bought for investment, not to live in. According to Business Week, 31 percent of new mortgages are interest only, a sign that people are stretching to their financial limits.

Both the New York Times and L.A. Times wonder if maybe — just maybe — there might not be at least regional housing bubbles, regardless of whether they will burst. Although Alan Greenspan says there are signs of regional froth — but no bubble! — he admits that there is “an unsustainable underlying pattern.” This article about how the bubble won’t burst because interest rates aren’t going up points out that the median home price has risen 7% since March.

Remember when 7% was a good annual rate of return?

I am not saying it is time for everyone to sell their houses and find decent apartments. I am saying that you need to seriously reconsider overextending yourself in the name of “owning your own house.”

In closing, a thoughtful piece about healthcare, a not quite as thoughtful study about how our surroundings effect our lives, and Memorial Day: remember our most recently fallen soldiers, battles happening now, and those caught in the crossfire. And don’t forget to remember the women who helped us win the wars of the past, including “Rosie the Riveter.”

In response to the allegations…. isn’t that a Red Herring over there?

Tom DeLay (R- TX) has a problem. No, not the problem about one of his “allies” breaking fundraising law. No, not the ethics violations, or even about the changes to the House Ethics Committee rules. No, not even about how he took his wife and daughter to tour sweatshops and brothels in Saipan, then decided that even though it was a protectorate of the United States he wasn’t going to do anything about what he saw there. No, this problem is not outlined in his copious Wikipedia entry.

His problem is that he was mentioned in passing on a fictional TV crime-drama. A choice quote from the producer of the show in question:

Every week, approximately 100 million people see an episode of the branded ‘Law & Order’ series. Up until today, it was my impression that all of our viewers understood that these shows are works of fiction as is stated in each episode. But I do congratulate Congressman DeLay for switching the spotlight from his own problems to an episode of a TV show.

Mr. Wolf certainly has that assessment right: Mr. Delay would like us to not pay attention to what is going on; he would rather we look not at Congress, but at Hollywood. Which is more relevant to your life? Capitol Hill or Beverly Hills?

It is bad enough that national news attention is being focused on stories of at best regional interest, such as a murder suspect spending a few days on a crane threatening to jump. No, alleged pop-star pedophiles and “runaway brides” are distracting us from closing military bases in a time of “war” and whether or not we are going to send a guy with serious diplomatic problems to be our UN Ambassador. Yes, the news is being dumbed down, and no it’s not just because sleazy-but-irrelevant stories sell. It’s getting harder and harder to get enough actual information about what is going on in the world to develop an independent opinion.

In closing, I bring you “When kitchen knives are outlawed, only outlaws will have kitchen knives,” and — Happy Memorial Day! — this disabled veteran.

Fashionably Late Commentary

Certain people would like you to believe that the riot of Afghanis in Pakistan resulting in multiple deaths was caused by a Newsweek article about alleged “Quran abuse” by American torturers. Logic defies this explanation.

First, they want you to think Newsweek, an American publication written in English, is widely read in Afghanistan. Think about that. I haven’t read a Newsweek outside a Dentist’s office in over a decade, but they want you to think Afghanis read it regularly enough to catch one sentence in a story.

Next, they want you to believe that this is a new accusation, which The World is just now hearing about. The truth is this has been known about and reported by various sources for 2 years. When Newsweek retracted the story, they merely said they could no longer confirm their source, not that it hadn’t happened. The Washington Post confirmed today that at almost a dozen former detainees claim this happened. How many sources does Newsweek need?

They would like you to believe that the Afghanis have nothing better to riot about. No, no problems in their homeland! Never mind the occupying army to whom the local government can’t even make suggestions, despite a “strategic partnership” between the occupied and occupying nations. Strategic partnership? Did I slip through a time rift into the Dot-Com boom? Oh, and never mind the fact that they aren’t even being allowed to rebuild their own nation.

No, they are too busy worrying about somebody peeing on a book halfway across the world. Yeah, right. Indeed, the Department of Defense said the riots had nothing to do with Newsweek. Olbermann is right.

This isn’t about Afghanistan, and it’s only barely about Newsweek. It’s about control of the media.

Update 5/26/2005: follow up

Told you so.

Way back when I said that the airport security situation was bad enough that companies were going to increase teleconferencing and corporate jet use. Today, SEC documents confirm it. In fact, “Citigroup and CVS Corp. (Research), which both require their executives to use company transportation at all times — even for personal matters — also cited security concerns as reasons for allowing senior officers to use corporate transportation, the report said.”

These are not small operations. Citigroup is component of 5 different stock indices, including both the DJIA and the S&P 500. CVS is “only” a member of two indices. These are only two companies specifically mentioned as having such a policy. There may be others that were not cited.

There are multiple, large companies that do not want their executives using commercial aircraft for any reason. That’s fascinating.

How to Not Get a Job Interview

This one goes all the people who don’t count as unemployed, the many more who are underemployed, and the millions more discouraged workers across the nation who don’t count as unemployed because they have given up on finding a job at all. May it also help those who are officially counted as unemployed.

Have you ever wondered why when you send a monster stack of resumes, you might only get a few replies? And why if you talk to company recruiters on the phone you then don’t necessarily get called in to interview? I’d like to give you a few warning flags that make a prospective employer put your resume on the bottom of the stack.

I barely know you.

Don’t follow instructions. If the ad says to send a resume with cover letter, send a resume with cover letter. Without a cover letter, your prospective boss does not necessarily know what job you are applying for. Even if all the letter says is that there is a resume, you are applying for X job, you can be reached by Y means, and are looking forward to interviewing, write it and send it! If it says fax, fax it. If it says e-mail, e-mail it. If they want it sent in the regular mail, do it. Never ever hand write your cover letter unless the ad specifically wants a hand-written cover letter — and then ask yourself why they want it hand-written.

Carpet Bomb the Universe with your Resume Back in the old days, sending a resume meant spending most of a dollar by the time you added the cost of a printed resume, a cover letter, an envelope, and a stamp. This made you really think twice about whether you stood any chance at all of getting that job, particularly when you have no job and income. Faxes and e-mail makes sending a resume virtually free. As a result, people have the tendency to send resumes for positions wildly above and wildly below their capabilities. Resist this temptation. The odds of the HR manager looking at your resume and saying both “This person isn’t qualified to be Information Technology Director!” and “But it looks like they would be great for that opening as a Computer Technician” is very low. By the same token, do not send a resume for a job that you won’t take if it is offered to you.

Don’t bother checking the grammar and spelling in your resume. Everbyody mkaes tupos own adn thn. I mean, Everybody makes typos now and then. However, a resume is a document that is supposed to sell you to a company. It has to be right. Anyone who looks at this document will be thinking about how it demonstrates your command of English and your attention to detail — in short, your ability to do the job well. If you happen to hit one of the hiring manager’s grammatical pet peeves, you can just forget getting an interview. In case you are curious, mine is s versus ‘s. Be sure to run that cover letter through the spell checker, too.

Go ahead and put your wildest dream job in the “objectives” blank of your resume template. Objectives are a great place for a candidate to shoot him/herself down. Why should I hire you if your goal is to go back to school across the country? Unless your job search focus is very narrow, it is very difficult to write an “objectives” statement that will mesh with even half the positions to which you may send your resume for consideration. Just delete that paragraph. Microsoft did you no favor by putting it in the template.

Don’t leave a way to contact you. Right now, double check that your current phone number and e-mail address is on your resume. It is not Human Resources’ job to track down your contact number. And remember to check your answering machine and e-mail regularly. Which brings me to the next point….

Don’t bother to return messages. You sent a resume. They called! They want to talk to you! But they just missed you. They aren’t calling again; it is your job to call them.

The Phone Interview

Treat it as no big deal. Even if the phone interview is nothing more than setting up a time for a sit-down interview, remember that your phone skills and ways of speaking are being noted. Oh, and try to talk from a quiet place. Turn down the TV. If you are out and about, do what you can, but nobody wants to listen to your shopping trip while asking you about your resume.

Get moral support Don’t ask people in the background to help you answer an interviewer’s questions. Odds are that the interviewer is not interested in hiring you and your friend. For that matter, if you need help answering questions on the phone, the interviewer will suspect you need help answering questions in real life. Like, say, at work.

Offer to stiff your boss. If you say you can take some extra time off for an interview, or that you can bring confidential materials from your current job, it is hardly a logical leap that you are willing to treat your next boss the same way.

You don’t need directions, you’ve got MapQuest! If the person on the other end of the phone offers directions, take them. Those internet mapping tools do not always know the best and easiest way to get someplace. On the other hand, the person you are talking to is sitting there, in the place you are going. He or she goes there every day, and knows how to get there and little details like “avoid such-and-such road because they are doing construction.” Go ahead and download a map in case you have a problem finding the place, but use the directions of someone who knows how to get there.

I hope this frees you to go that extra step and get that job interview… and give you the opportunity to embarrass yourself in person.

Ok, Now What?

So Real ID got passed, snuck into a must-pass military funding bill that nobody dared vote against lest the next opponent’s campaign flog the idea however false that they voted against our troops! It was put there specifically to avoid debate and ensure passage. Now what?

If you are not sure why Real ID is bad, you can start with this nice summary from UnrealID.com. Here’s security expert Bruce Schneier on why it won’t actually make anybody more secure (and might even make us less secure). Here’s Declan McCullagh on what Real ID means to you (short version, getting your license renewed becomes a multi-day DMV odyssey, or plan on never getting on a plane or into a Federal office ever again for anything. How quickly can you lay hands on 4 pieces of easily verified documentation of your name, birthday, citizenship, gender, picture, and street address? What about your 16 year old kid/grandkid?). If that is not enough, here’s what the ACLU has to say. The bit about the Homeland Security Secretary having the authority to ignore any laws he doesn’t like to secure the border is confirmed here by the Washington Post. The whole thing may even be a violation of international law. Of course you should feel free to read the actual text of the legislation.

But none of this answers the question of what to do now. I propose a three-front assault:

Contact your Representative and Senator. They passed this thing, and they can pass a bill that cancels it. Remind them of that whole getting re-elected thing.

Support the groups that are leading the legal fight against it. The required changes in ID rules need to be in place by 2008. There is still hope, and plenty of people fighting this thing. Give money, give time, write letters, write your local newspaper, blog.

Apply heat to State officials. State officials already don’t like this thing. It’s expensive to implement, imposes not a huge but rather a freaking huge bureaucracy, will multiply the amount of time certain basic state services take to deliver, and if that weren’t enough will decrease public safety. How? Remember that the original purpose of a drivers license is to say you can drive? Because drivers licenses will be harder to get, more people will drive without them — perhaps badly, definitely without insurance. Go ahead and use a multi-pronged approach and write your state representatives, senator, and governor. Contact information is easily googled.

Carry on. Nobody can fight for your rights better than you can.

More Details Reveal More Devils

Ok, this is just wrong:

Elderly people with low incomes may lose some of their food stamps if they sign up for the new Medicare prescription drug benefit, the Bush administration said Saturday.

You know what’s even more wrong? The New York Times was scooped by an astute guy with a blog.

But back to the issues at hand. The Food Stamp Program is designed to help some of the poorest Americans, those who can’t even afford food for their families. We’re talking about folks who have to think twice about paying full price for house brand macaroni and cheese mix. The purpose of the Medicare Drug Benefit was to make it so Medicare recipients didn’t have to choose between groceries and medication — both of which they need to stay healthy and alive. But if you want help paying for your medications, you may loose your help putting food on the table.

What happened? Did Big Ag not pay as much to the Administration’s re-election fund as Big Pharma did?

The official excuse for this robbery is that since these people will have lower pharmacy costs, they will have more to spend on food and actually come out ahead on the whole deal. Let’s look at the cited example:

The drug benefit will be available to individuals with monthly income of $1,197 or less and married couples with income of $1,604 or less.

The guide gives this example of how the new law would affect a hypothetical Medicare beneficiary, Mrs. Smith, who receives $798 a month in Social Security. She does not receive Medicaid. She now pays $147 a month for medical expenses, including $51 for three prescription drugs. Her monthly rent is $421.

Under the Medicare drug plan, Mrs. Smith will not have to pay a monthly premium or a deductible. She will have a $3 co-payment on each drug, for $9 a month. Her medical spending will decline to $105 a month, from $147, for a saving of $42.

But Mrs. Smith’s monthly food stamp allotment, $27, will be reduced to $10 a month, because her “out-of-pocket medical costs have gone down.” The administration says she will come out ahead because “she still has $25 more cash in her pocket – $42 medical savings, less the $17 decrease in food stamps.”

Forgive me for pointing out that Mrs. Smith is paying far too big a percentage of her income in rent each month. Well over half her money goes to rent, when she should really spend no more than a third. Now, I don’t think you can find a decent place to live for $266 a month, so she might consider a roommate.

My second point is what 3 prescription drugs could she possibly be taking that add up to only $51 per month? Remember, she doesn’t have any coverage for that in the “before” scenario, so she’s paying full price. Even generics are going to run more than $17 each for most things that anybody would need to buy monthly. Oh, and keep in mind that last year prescription prices went up between 4.1% and 7.1% depending whose figures you like.

Finally, according to the official “after” numbers, Mrs. Smith is ahead $25 per month. That’s about 3% of her income. Of course she’s still spending over half her money on rent and 15% of her income on medical expenses. Economically she is still behind the 8-ball, particularly if she owns a car.

But hey, maybe she can afford to go crazy and buy a can of sale-priced tuna to go in her house-brand mac-n-cheese.

Another Hole in the Wall

I have for many years had an interest in education and the educational system. I think it may have started with a copy of Why Johnny Can’t Read or The Closing of the American Mind found on a discount book rack when I was in college. The one incontrovertible conclusion I have come to is that absolutely everything that happens in a school needs to be measured by two yardsticks: Does it promote student safety? and Does it educate students? Once we have established that it is safe and educational, then we can start asking more difficult questions, such as what it teaches and how well it does so. If it isn’t safe and educational, it doesn’t belong in school. The end.

Perhaps my ideas on education and education reform are biased by the fact that I read downright subversive things on the subject, such as the writings of Etta Kralovec and former award winning teacher John Taylor Gatto. Kralovec speaks to me about what schools should be like; Gatto speaks to that part of me that realized many years ago that most teachers are not out there to teach independent thought. There are of course many excellent exceptions to this idea, but they are yet a minority. Perhaps one in ten of the teachers and professors you remember wanted you to truly think beyond applying a narrow classroom concept to a narrow classroom example.

Nevertheless, I read a news item last night that caused my jaw to drop open. It involves a series of experiments in India involving unschooled children and unsupervised computer use. This IT expert set up computer kiosks in areas of poverty, positioned so that only kids could use them. And then he set the kids loose. The results are consistent:

With the computer switched on, the children press all the keys and every mouse button.

But Sugata has noticed a pattern emerging after the first initial chaos.

“You find that the noise level begins to come down, and from somewhere a leader appears.

“Often his face is not visible in the crowd, but he is controlling the mouse because suddenly you see the mouse begin to move in an orderly fashion.

“And then suddenly a lot of children’s voices will say ‘Oh, that pointer can be moved!’ And then you see the first click, which – believe it or not – happens within the first three minutes.”

Narput Singh has the mouse and takes control. And within three minutes he has clicked and, to his surprise and pleasure, inadvertently opened a game.

He doesn’t distinguish between educational games and those that are just for fun, and he is soon learning English words through a painting game with colours to fill in.

Whilst he is picking up the use of the computer directly, others around him are absorbing what he does.

For Sugata, it is this group learning which is significant.

“We know that in nine months the entire group of children in a village would have reached approximately the level of an office secretary, which means they know dragging and dropping files, they know downloading, they can play video and audio and they can surf the internet”.

That’s right. Within 3 minutes, leadership evolves, and they figure out how to use a mouse. Mr. Sugata’s conclusion: “Groups of children given adequate digital resources can meet the objectives of primary education on their own – most of the objectives.” And remember, these kids started the experiment barely literate and with no computer experience whatsoever. Of course, his idea of “meet[ing] the objectives of primary education” may differ wildly from your or mine or the Principal of the local school’s idea, but the concept is intriguing, startling.

Maybe schools are the problem.

In closing, it is not too late to make noise about the Federal Government’s back door effort to put together a national ID card system at state expense. This thing goes beyond the stated purpose of trying to keep drivers licenses out of the hands of illegal immigrants. Remember, the purpose of a Drivers License is to show that you know how to drive. Just because it gets used as identification does not make that it’s primary purpose. The fact that non-compliant cards “could not be used as IDs for boarding planes, entering federal buildings or even to pick up mail at the post office” makes them an internal passport, required at checkpoints everywhere. And you won’t be able to challenge it in court, in person anyway.

I once watched a cashier refuse to take a check from a man because he had a state ID card instead of a state drivers license. He looked at her as if she were out of her mind and simply said “I am legally blind!”

Another bit of anecdotal evidence showing that we need more ability to think independently in this country.