Amethyst Reese

Things that make it obvious that your “job offer” is just a piece of spam you’re throwing at the wall to see what sticks:

• Saying you found my resume on Monster.com or some other job site when I have never ever registered or even visited the site in question.

• Saying you found my resume on a site I did sign up for, and then blatently ignoring that my account is marked as “not willing to relocate” and offering me a job in backwater Arkansas, Montana, Tennessee, or South Dakota. There is exactly one place I want to relocate to, and that is the west coast.

• Requiring knowledge in technologies that aren’t even mentioned in passing on my resume.

• Looking for “Rock Start” software engineers to join a start-up.

• Advertising your start-up with a bullet point of “e-commerce… e-commerce… e-commerce”.

• Having your offer email include a footnote saying “Message sent with an unregistered version of MailList King!”. Nothing says legitimate like a recruiter who uses an unregistered piece of spam software.

Sigh…

On local government corruption in New York:

Where there is money and people with power corruption is very likely. What fascinates me, about America specifically, is how ingrained the representative democracy concept is. Direct democracy is this wild and crazy thing that absolutely and directly = Hitler. There could be an interesting argument why Swiss style direct democracy would not work for a huge country like the US. But what about local government? What about little towns? It’s fascinating that Americans from a very young age learn that the head of local government is the mayor. What would happen if a little town in nowhere decided to mimic Switzerland in governance and eliminates the middle men? Doom?

As an American, I think the biggest reason that the majority of Americans embrace (worship?) representative democracy is because it frees them from feelings of responsibility in the outcome of the government, and means that much less effort they must contribute back to society. Why learn about all the issues and directly vote for what I want, when I could more easily just elect someone else to do all that hard stuff for me so I can spend more time on the sofa watching the drama of Hollywood retards unfold on high definition TV?

As an added benefit, when my elected representatives then vote the “wrong” way, I certainly can’t blame myself, because A) I’m only one of thousands, or millions, of votes, B) I voted for the other guy, or C) I didn’t vote at all / that’s why I don’t ever vote. It’s the exact same reason that companies pay barrels of money for IT support contracts; it’s less work, and when something goes wrong, the blame always shifts to someone else.

Solution: Nuke it from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure…

Now that I’m restarting my “blag”, I gotta have a bit of ripe content. Ever-so-relevant: Explosm’s cartoon, Cyanide and Happiness, has pretty much summed up my frustrations with the Pidgin IM client:

I wish the Empathy project would hurry up and mop the floor after the mess Pidgin made of its end-users…