Category Archives: jobs

A Union

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…doesn’t like Amazon buying Whole Foods.

[United Food and Commercial Workers International Union President, Marc] Perrone plans to file a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission, arguing that letting Amazon buy Whole Foods would trigger a wave of store closures and eventually quash customer choice.

With a straight face, he argued in his complaint (which somehow fell into The Washington Post‘s hands before the filing) that

Regardless of whether Amazon has an actual Whole Foods grocery store near a competitor, their online model and size allows them to unfairly compete with every single grocery store in the nation.

So, doing a better job of competing in an industry, doing a better job of selling products customers want, is in some way unfair.  Hmm….

And

I’ve got concerns, and our organization has concerns, about what technology does and at what cost to society[.]

Sure he does.  So long as society is defined as union society.  Because technology improvements benefit the broader society of ordinary American citizens.  Just compare tech-developed and built cars with buggies and wagons.  Compare today’s house with yesterday’s.  Compare today’s communications media with yesterday’s.  Compare today’s cars with yesterday’s, come to that.

The union, Perrone said, is worried that America’s shifting shopping preferences will spark a crisis in its industry the same way automation and trade with China and Mexico has wiped out factory work.

Our factory work hasn’t been wiped out; it’s just changed its character because competition made those manufacturing industries get better and do better.

The union just wants a protection from competition.

Imagine that.

Grievances

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Thousands of State Department and US Agency for International Development employees indicated in a survey they are worried about the future of their agencies, with some expressing particular concern about lack of support from the Trump administration and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

And

Many of the more than 35,000 State Department and USAID employees responding to the survey indicated longtime frustration with the way the agencies function, including poor technology and duplicative and redundant processes that make frequent workarounds necessary. They also cited pet projects created by ambassadors and Congress, according to the report reviewed by the [Wall Street] Journal.

Well, that’s the reason for attempts in the Trump administration to efficient-ize things.  More really can be done with less money if there’s less duplication and fewer useless projects created for the sake of virtue signaling.

On the other hand,

USAID employees in the report said they are particularly concerned about the consequences of a move to fully absorb USAID into the State Department, which officials are considering.

This “concern” is just about turf preservation, not about improving efficiency—which contributes to why these kinds of problems are of such long standing.

These guys can always resign if they don’t like the new direction.  Government jobs are not an entitlement.

Food Stamps and Work

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Now that the Obama administration’s waiver of work requirements for families without dependent children in order to be eligible to obtain food stamps has been rescinded, the vast numbers of recipients are being greatly reduced.  Alabama, for instance, this year resumed the work or work training requirement in a pilot program involving 13 of its counties and has seen its food stamp enrollment fall by 85%.  Georgia is running a similar program, and it’s seen a 58% drop.

It’s all well and good that the work/work training requirement has moved people off the food stamp rolls, but the flip side of that is what happens to those that are: are they actually working or training, or are they just shoved off the rolls, still unemployed, now deeper in poverty?  The Maine results give an indication.

An analysis of a group of 7,000 Mainers who left SNAP in 2014 found their total earnings increased from $3.85 million in the third quarter 2014 to $8.24 million in the last quarter of 2015.

That’s more than a doubling in earnings in just over a year.  These folks, clearly, are getting work; they haven’t just been shoved over a cliff.

Kansas is getting similar results.

…60% of former beneficiaries found employment within 12 months and their incomes rose by an average of 127% per year….

Hmm….

The Specialness of Snowflakes

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The New York Times newsroom is going to walk out (as I write this) on Thursday because they don’t like the cutbacks in editors (an understandable concern, even if the newsroom denizens offered no alternative) and other personnel reductions the paper is being forced to make in an effort to reduce costs to a survivable level.  It’s their plaints, though, that drew my attention.  The copy editors group wrote a letter to Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Managing Editor Joseph Kahn in which they said in part,

You often speak about the importance of engaging readers, of valuing, investing, and giving a voice to readers. Dean and Joe: we are your readers, and you have turned your backs on us.

News flash, guys.  Baquet’s and Kahn’s readers, the NYT‘s readers, are the customers who pay around $325/yr for a subscription, or more than $500/yr for both print and online subscriptions.  You guys get paid to read your boss’ paper in order to make error corrections.

NYT reporters sent a letter to the same targets in solidarity with the copy editors.

Requiring them to dance for their supper sends a clear message to them, and to us, that the respect we have shown the Times will not be reciprocated.

Respect has to be earned, guys.  You have a legitimate beef regarding the lack of transparency in personnel moves your paper is making (another part of your letter), but respect has to be earned the same way any honest American earns it: through actual deeds.  You guys don’t get respect just because you think you’re special.  In particular, you utterly disrespect your readers—those paying customers—when you masquerade unsubstantiated rumors, which you amusingly attribute to “senior officials,” to sources who “are speaking anonymously because they’re not authorized to speak,” and the like, as fact.  And you do that while also carefully declining to corroborate those rumors with on-the-record remarks.

Question for you both—and for Baquet and Kahn—when y’all come back to work on Friday (today, as I post this): did anyone notice your absence?  Besides the janitors, I mean.  Folks like actual customers.

When Were They Not?

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All IT Jobs Are Cybersecurity Jobs Now goes the headline on a recent Wall Street Journal article, and the subhead reads The rise of cyberthreats means that the people once assigned to setting up computers and email servers must now treat security as top priority.

It’s like these folks—both in the IT arena and in the reporting media—have just had an epiphany.

The global “WannaCry” ransomware attack that peaked last week, and has affected at least 200,000 computers in 150 countries, as well as the growing threat of Adylkuzz, another new piece of malware, illustrate a basic problem that will only become more pressing as ever more of our systems become connected: the internet wasn’t designed with security in mind, and dealing with that reality isn’t cheap or easy.

No, it wasn’t.  But it’s not the Internet that’s at the heart of these failures.  It’s the company connections to the Internet, and the corporate human employees who aren’t being trained in how to handle the company’s connection to the Internet that is at the heart of these failures.  IT has—or should have had—security at its heart from the time the first companies connected themselves to the Internet.

Even if nation-level espionage might not have been on the minds of private enterprise, the proprietary nature of company information and the fact of corporate espionage are as old as corporations.

Christopher Mims, in his article at the link, offered some sound advice for today.  That the advice should have been obvious yesterday in no way invalidates it for today.

  1. Retrain IT staff on security—or replace them. In today’s world of ever-multiplying threats and dependence on connected assets, all IT staff must now be cybersecurity staff first.

Indeed.

  1. Push everything to the cloud. It used to be the job of IT personnel was to build and maintain the tools employees need. Now, pretty much anything can be done better with a cloud-based service.

I disagree with this.  The cloud is no more securable than a corporate’s internal network—and when (not if) the cloud gets hacked, it won’t be only one company’s stuff that gets stolen or held hostage.  Even if it’s only a company’s internal cloud that gets hacked, the whole of the company’s innards get exposed.

  1. New IT investment will need baked-in security.

Can I get an amen, brothers and sisters?