Recruiting Animal

Social Mobility In Toronto

The Toronto Star features a family that has depended on its Christmas charity boxes for three generations.

The grandfather, though earning only a security guard's wages, decided to have seven children.

So, his daughter, Ivy Chrysler, now 50, starting receiving the boxes since when she was five years old.

Her eldest daughter started receiving the boxes when she was two and now her children get them -- as do the grandchildren of Ivy's twin sister, Sydney Mead.

What has gone wrong in this family? Obviously Ivy's father and mother, either unaware of or unwilling to use birth control had more children than they could afford to provide for.

Ivy is now a widow without the income a husband would normally provide and she says that after she was married her husband went back to school so that they were short of funds during that time. But she still went ahead  and had a child when she couldn't afford to do so. And now her children are are in the same boat.

Ivy and her sister are not immigrants nor are they members of a visible minority. So it would seem safe to say that their families' financial problems are clearly due to a problem of family culture. Also, perhaps, it is a problem of community culture since she grew up and still lives in a part of Toronto that is traditionally the home of poor people.

Heather Has SAD

Long suffering Venus de Micro appears to be blaming her health problems on Seasonal Affective Disorder. At least, she is now reporting that she sits in front of a light box for 30 minutes everyday and feels great.

Read all about it

How To Be A Compelling Leader

Make big emotional promises that appeal to
passionate desires rather than reason.
And steer clear of the details.

That rhetoric was always stale, despite the excellence of its delivery.

When, for example, he said that he wanted to protect the pensions of employees rather than the severance of CEO’s, he was appealing not to reason but to a force very much more powerful than reason—resentment.

It is true that chief executive officers have managed to extract large sums from companies over whose destruction they have presided.

But it requires very little thought to realize that it is a little late in the day to save people’s pensions by being derogatory about CEO’s, however much they might deserve it.

Britain has seen the Obama effect before. In 1997, a fresh-faced politician called Anthony Blair, promising the sun, the moon, and the stars, spoke with a passionate intensity that was somewhat lacking in detail and was elected to office in the land.

His was a bright new dawn: a government that governed for the many not the few, as he put it, giving the country a fresh start after a long-lasting, decrepit, and exhausted government had been thoroughly discredited.

Within a short time, this former unilateral-disarmer had proved himself the most belligerent and bellicose leader of Britain in recent times, willing to attack anyone as long as the victim couldn’t fight back.

His protests at the corruption of the previous government soon seemed to be more at its trifling scale rather than its dishonesty. What had been but a cottage industry became wholesale looting

Theodore Dalrymple

Jobvite

Jobvite, Inc. - Profiles - ERE Vendor Watch.

Job-Hunting For Losers

Lindsay Pollack says that if you have low grades the only way to get a job is through networking.

"A resume with a low GPA will likely never make it out of the slush pile, so your better bet is to find jobs through networking..." (GPA = Grade Point Average)

The same rule applies to anyone who has bad marks of any sort on their record.

The Art of Conversation

From Violent Acres.
Offbeat but way better than most columns that tell boring people to practice listening. Yeah, really, that's just what they need.

Gen Y Boosters Are Dumb

Audio version here

Frizzy-haired, New York-based, Canadian author, Malcolm Gladwell has just released a new book that everyone is talking about. It's surely going to be a bestseller.

And perhaps that's partly because the main premise is very simple and easy to understand: even naturally talented people need practice to become really good at what they do.

That's pretty obvious isn't it? But sometimes the obvious has to be pointed out again and again and again.

And that's why I'm going to remind you now that 99% of the people who go around boosting Gen Y are just plain dumb.

Outrageous Claims

Listen to this claim that about Barack Obama’s victory. It's not only the best example yet of the growing influence of Generation Y in America and the world.

"Gen Y is smart, diverse, energized, socially and politically aware and able to use the Internet to do pretty much anything."

"Pretty much anything." What does that mean? Everything and nothing.

Well-Informed

You know what? I don't think the average person is well informed politically no matter how old they are. And I don't think they ever will be. You know why? It's too much work.

Look. If Gen Y is so busy being well informed, who's watching Access Hollywood? The old guys? The Boomers? Come on, look at the ads. They're not selling Depends.

A Deceptive Brand

And you know what? Gen Y isn't diverse either. When people talk about Gen Y they're only talking about middle class college educated people who plan on having careers.

And here's something else. When people talk about Gen Y they never tell you stories like this.

Queens University is one of Canada's top universities. It's across the lake from Rochester in the United States. Every September, they have a big homecoming party and a few thousand old students march around the football field during half time.

Drunken Brawl

But recently they had to cancel this event because the current students like to get drunk and wreck things. For instance, this past September, a customer at a fast-food restaurant was attacked and put into a coma. He woke up after a month but he's going to have permanent brain damage.

And this was really a Gen Y event because the Queens University students put out the word on Facebook that this is going to be a big drunken brawl and students came from all around to participate.

Now it's possible that the student who put that guy into a coma was "smart, diverse, energized, socially and politically aware and able to use the Internet to do pretty much anything." But he was also a goof. And he wasn't the only one.

In Conclusion

As history progresses, education is becoming more widespread. So does freedom spread in all sorts of relationships. Nevetheless, Gen Y is, in many ways, as ignorant and foolish as any other generation. In fact, they're almost as ignorant as their much-maligned parents, the baby boomers. But the boosters, they forget to mention that.

Charles Krugel, Labour & Employment Lawyer

LISTEN HERE

The Recruiting Animal Show
Featuring: CHUCKIE KRUGEL of Chicago.

On The Couch:
Maureen Sharib, Carl Chapman, Jerry Albright, Cliff Mintz, Julia Stone.

CLIP: Intro & Legal Interview Questions

Maureen Sharib "No laws against ruse calls." Am I hearing this right?
Julia Stone bart simpson will be relieved

Branding and Authenticity

According to the JobMob:

The Unbranded Life
- You live spontaneously according to the needs and feelings of the moment.
- As a result, you show a different face at different times.

When you Brand something,
- You choose to leave a deliberate, consistent impression
  so there's no confusion about who you are.
- You hide the multi-dimensional you
- You present a one-dimensional you
- So people get a very clear impression about what they can expect from you.

Is that authentic?
- You are showing a real part of yourself. But only part.
- By removing anything else from view, you help people
  forget that there is more to you.
- The result is a version of you that is highly edited
- The clarity this brings is useful as long as a relationship is based on this alone
- when the hidden factors are significant, branding is deceptive

Don't Re-invent The Wheel

Keyword: schnorrer.

Productivity501 warns us to make sure that we don't waste hours figuring out how to do something that someone else can explain in 5 minutes.

He urges us to deliberately build relationships with people who have expertise in different areas than our own.

Offer to help them with your special knowledge, he says. Then they will want to reciprocate.

Problem:

This author is telling you, essentially, to set up an informal barter network for information sharing. The problem is that it comes in the guise of a personal relationship or friendship which really doesn't exist.

This amounts to using people for practical purposes.

Many outgoing people can do it easily. And, indeed many don't mind taking advantage of people, plain and simple. But lots of people don't like doing this. And they can't always offer something in return.

Moreover, often, you need a lot of preliminary knowledge before the expert can tell you something in five minutes. And the only way she can help you is to do the job herself. Or spend an age explaining it to you.

See also: How To Mooch

1. Hint that you need help.
2. Show a bit of pain.
3. When the offer comes, say something like "I don't know. Are you sure
   you can spare the time?" That shows you care about the donor. (haha)
4. Don't take too much.
5. Offer something in return when you can.