Category: General

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The 2nd ammendment doesn’t grant the right to bear arms…

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It is supposed to insure it.

I found an interesting analysis about the 2nd amendment a few weeks ago. The analysis states that the language of the 2nd is straightforward and unambiguous.

It is assumed, according to this analysis that citizens living under the constitution inherently have the right to own arms and that right is not granted by the 2nd amendment but is protected from government interference by the 2nd amendment.

The analysis is far more detailed and can be read in its entirety here.

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So without thinking about it too much, I sent the link to an acquaintance on Twitter.

He was, as always embattled with one of the gun control advocates from one of the groups like Moms Demand Action, or Everytown for Gun safety. This analysis made his point and he sent it to the gun grabbers.

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I’m always surprised by the nasty comments from the gun control crowd. For an “enlightened”, “Progressive”, “Well Educated”, group, you’d think their vocabulary would have a bit more depth.

Nonetheless it got me thinking about the logic the gun control folks are using.

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Some of the gun control people absolutely believe that guns should be removed from the hands of people because of the harm some guns might cause.

That led me to this thought;

“By their logic, I could advocate bringing back Eugenics Laws because one of their descendants might be responsible for killing a bunch of people.”

Their logic is just as flawed about guns as mine is about descendants.

You can’t know a gun is going to hurt someone any more than you can know a descendant is going to be a criminal.

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There is no family on the planet that doesn’t have at least one criminal in the family tree and no family is immune from producing criminals.

I could as easily make the case that preventing people from breeding is likely to be equally beneficial to society and the planet in the long term, as removing guns.

After all, fewer people sucking up resources burning fossil fuel, etc. would be better long term to combat global warming.

I’ve considered invoking the Zardoz paradigm where the primitives were given guns so that they’d war amongst themselves thereby keeping their numbers manageable.

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I don’t think that would add anything useful to the debate other than to offend the fem-nazis by forcing them to view a half naked, hairy, violent, Sean Connery.

Humm… Might be worth it after all!

I wonder all the time, why the “Moms Demand” and “Everytown” groups aren’t also teaching gun safety. I believe that there are too many guns to confiscate, even if I believed that line of illogic. I believe instead, that teaching children gun safety would save more lives.

I absolutely believe the fewer people in the general population who have knowledge about proper handling of, and behavior around guns; the more likely gun accidents become.

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For me its simply pragmatic. If you teach gun safety you can’t go wrong.

The educated gun control folks reject that kind of education. These are the same people that seem content with censoring other knowledge as well.

These folks are content with not teaching children via Chemistry Class about dangerous chemicals in the home. In spite of the fact that accidental poisoning is common.

They’re offended by locker room nudity, but not extremely suggestive nudity & sexuality in movies. They’ll decry playground fights as unacceptable, but will show DVD’s to their children depicting bloody fights and dismemberment.

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Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating censorship any more than I’m advocating gun control.

I just wish these groups were consistent in their logic.

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I’ve really become suspicious

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In my on-going search for a permanent job, I’ve had some very negative experiences.

In some cases, those experiences were due to my own failings, in other cases I, like a lot of the aging boomers got victimized.

As a result, I’m always suspicious of headhunters.

My experience with placement personnel has been universally negative over the past decade. Even within the headhunters, there are gradations of suspicion.

For example:

My suspicion is heightened when the headhunter is from well out of the local area.

Why would a company in California hire a headhunting agency in New Jersey?

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Based on past experiences and lots of wasted time, I’m a tad more suspicious when a New Jersey based headhunter has an obviously Indian name and they’re telling me about a temporary opportunity 1200 miles away from my current location.

How well does this person know the job market or geography?

The odds are they don’t. Often these folks are actually in India and the address they’ve given in New Jersey is essentially an empty office suite.

This is not to say that American Headhunters don’t do the same thing.

Recently, I drove to Huntington Beach to personally hand my resume to someone. The office was actually an executive suite with a receptionist who told me flat out, she’d never seen anyone from the company I’d come to see.

I’m likely to flush an email instantly if it’s obvious that the headhunter didn’t read my resume, or if their email is rife with typos, or worse yet, obvious and incorrectly copied HTML

I realize that I may be tossing out viable leads, but from the old school perspective; “If you can’t be bothered to at least look at your work before you send it out to the world, you can’t be very diligent in negotiation for salary on my behalf.”

Lets be honest here. Technically, a headhunter is your agent. If they look like shit in their correspondence or can’t communicate, YOU’RE going to look like shit too

If a headhunter references their “database” but I’ve never done business with them, heard of their company, or the email address they’re using is very old, I’m very suspicious.

Beginning any relationship with a lie is a bad idea. Beginning a business relationship with lies is especially bad. Why don’t they tell you something like “I saw your resume on Dice, or Monster, or LinkedIn.” At least then I’d know what information they’d been privy to and might not be quite as circumspect. I’ve had way too many experiences where I spend the time, answer their questions, and then… The sound of one hand clapping.

In my case, I go right to the memory of working very hard with a headhunter daily, I was writing letters and tweaking my resume for weeks on end, for various jobs, only to discover that I was doing the headhunter’s job and he was using my letters and chunks of my resume to sell other candidates.

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The parasite would have continued to bleed me for who knows how long except that I was at an interview and the interviewer asked if I used aliases.

When I said, “No” he presented me with a poorly edited version of my resume with someone else’s name on it, and one of the cover letters I’d written.

Needless to say nobody got the job. The headhunter in question and his company, were barred from submitting candidates. I noticed recently that headhunters office was for lease.

The point to all of this is that I’m getting interest in my online profile, but I’m very curious as to why all that interest is from companies outside of California.

Not that leaving California is necessarily a problem, but these are for positions within California. Why aren’t local headhunters working these positions?

The real problem is,how do you know if these headhunters and the positions they offer are real, or if these positions are bogus, designed to get you to turn over information “necessary to get the job” that is really being given to identity thieves.

At the risk of sounding like a luddite… 

I don’t like this new internet job thingy. I don’t like it one little bit!

Here’s an update.

After 5 headhunters contacting me, one of them twice. Then me following up with them politely and providing the information that they requested yet again…

…The sound of one hand clapping. 

I checked these companies out to the best of my ability. I did due diligence but lets face it anyone can make a web page and have a phone number forwarded to a cell phone.

Another colossal waste of time. Time I might add that I don’t have to waste. 

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Hahahaha, Another day another blog post in the trash!

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Yep, started working on a post yesterday.

I re-read it today and thought, “What was in that coffee?” 

So after spending a while seeing if I could figure out where I was going with the piece, I decided to admit it was a scratch.

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“It’s dead Jim.”

Maybe tomorrow will be a better day for blogging,

No Guarantees!

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I hate having public profiles…

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Lets face it looking for a job these days is pretty sucky.

Gone are the days when you sent your resume to an actual company after reading an ad in the paper. Now you’re directed to some web site where your profile is suddenly visible to the world.

Even if you try to maintain some small amount of privacy by minimizing the number of job web sites you visit, or job site accounts you’re still exposing all kinds of information.

Literally within one hour of my making a profile on a well known job search site, I’ve been receiving strange emails.

Most of which ask for this kind of information.

First and the last name                                   : < They Already Have this – They saw it on my resume
Email ID                                                          : < They Already Have this – Its on my resume and they contacted me via email
Phone/Mobile number                                     : < They Already Have this – They saw it on my resume
Willingness to relocate (Y/N)                           : < Reasonable
Availability for F2F Interview/ Phone Interview: < Obviously anytime
Availability to start                                            : < Reasonable
Current Location                                               : < They Already Have this – This is on my resume
Work status                                                      : < I’m guessing they’re asking if I need an H1B1 visa 
Expected Hourly rate                                       : < What are they paying?

And yet most of these silly headhunters ask for all of this AGAIN!

They have the ability to download and have no doubt seen my resume. But for some reason they want to wast everyone’s time by engaging in busy work.

Here’s a another one.

Full name:
Work Authorization status:
Current location:
Contact Number:
Best time to reach you on weekdays:
Rate $/hr on W2 (Without benefits):
Onsite availability:
Willing to Relocate:
Preferred location to work: MS OR AL

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This one is funny because he claims the position is in California but is still asking me where I prefer to work, Is that Mississippi, Oregon, Alabama? Or is he asking if I want to work in Mississippi OR Alabama?

Yet there’ve been absolutely no responses from the actual positions that I applied for, other than the perfunctory confirmation emails saying, “we got your email”.

The problem is this.

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If you want to participate, you have to give up any illusion of privacy. You know beyond a shadow of a doubt that virtually all the information that a bad guy could want is going to be available either because someone got careless or that they looked legitimate and you actually gave them the keys to steal your identity.

Talk about a rock and a hard place!

Over the past four years, I’ve tried faxing my information to headhunters and / or corporations in response to their ads. I’ve received to date no response to any of those inquiries. In fact, attempting to followup on those resumes or applications has resulted in one run-around after another because HR departments are so focused on using an on-line system, they never think to look at actual paper.

I’m under no illusion, that anything I fax to a corporation ever hits paper. The fax is converted directly to an OCR’d version of the document, codified, modified and distributed to various databases.

Which leads me to sending something via mail.

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I’ve considered going really OLD SCHOOL because the paper would be handled, is a pain in the ass, and might actually be noticed while it was being scanned into the corporate databases. The fear is that if stuff is too much of a pain in the ass, that my resume will simply end up in the shredder without being scanned or handled at all.

So that leads back to exposing information that really should be private to the freakin world.

This is one of those times when I really miss the old days.

I’d get a phone call asking me to come in for an interview, meet the hiring manager, have a conversation,  then depending on that interview I’d go to the next stage. 

Sigh.

 

 

Posted on

Goodbye Mr. Nimoy

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Thank you for the years of entertainment.

Thank you for the Poetry, Photography, and Mr. Spock. 

Thanks for owning your age and showing us all that aging can be done with grace.

I wish I’d had the chance to thank you personally for all these things and for providing such a great role model. 

You’re going to be sorely missed.

Earth, out.

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