Not a Potted Plant

Every now and again I look at Clancy’s hospital’s employment page. It’s unlikely that I would actually get a job there, but it’s a source of interest all the same. They recently had a job posting for a Health Information Specialist, which is basically an IT job with an information processing focus. What jumped out at me were the job requirements. Namely, that it listed a need for experience for Acronym Software. I had to look up what the acronym meant, because it was news to me. It turned out, they wanted experience in the precise medical records software they are using. Really obscure software. Software that is actually so bad that they are going to be retiring it next year after a petition made its way around the office. But they only want candidates who have used this.

Now, it doesn’t make all that much difference to me. The alternative to knowing the software already is having to train someone, and they’re not going to train someone that they know is going to be gone next year. So even if I were to apply, I’d be out of consideration either way. And I guess I see why you wouldn’t want to train someone in software that you’re going to retire anyway, thus wanting prior experience. Even so, this is all such short-balling that I find it quite aggravating. It’s something I have long considered to be a part of the larger problem of employers being unwilling to train employees. I’ve become increasingly hesitant to talk about this because it actually contradicts my professional experience, where after each move (until the current one) I found a job that required training. Yet even then, I remember at one point they ramped up the requirements such that I was no longer qualified for a position I’d held for over a year before being promoted out of.

Anyhow, I thought about that when I read Dave Schuler’s post on the reverse-side of our employment problem: the inability of employers to find the right people. The first thought that comes to mind is that they’re not offering enough money, but it looks to me like acronym requirements may actually be playing a larger role:

I recommend that your read the post in full but I’ll summarize it quickly. Roughly 10% of employers aren’t willing to pay what prospective employees demand. More than half of the employers report that they can’t find candidates with the necessary skills, experience, or inter-personal skills and there is some evidence to suggest that experience is the most important of these factors. Although once again I am reminded of the help wanted ad I saw in 1982: “IBM PC Expert Wanted; Must Have 5 Years Experience” (the IBM PC was introduced in 1981—not even the people who designed it had five years of experience with it).

With my generation, it was experience with Java longer than Java had been around. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

When I went to college, one of the things that they impressed upon me was that the work world was “each man (or woman) for himself (or herself)” and that nobody was going to stick around with employers forever and no employer was going to show any loyalty to its employees. This has a certain logic and efficiency to it. But it also comes at a significant cost, and the oft-cited cost (employee job insecurity) is only a part of it. On the employer side, churn causes a loss in accumulated tribal knowledge. Chances are, if I leave one company for another company, the company I am leaving actually lost more than the company I am going to is gaining. There are advantages to having new people coming in with new ideas and all of that, but the company I left has to train the next guy to know all that I knew, and the company I am going to has to train me on all of the things the guy I am replacing knew (if I’m replacing anybody). I’m sure that somewhere there is a perfect equilibrium between “new blood” and continuity, though the tilt has gone from from too far in one direction to too far in another.

One of the bigger costs, though, is that when an employee might leave at any given moment, it doesn’t pay to train them. Or to have to train them as little as possible. Now, it’s been my experience that employers are far too unconcerned with churn, accepting it as a fact of life as though there is nothing that can be done about it. But even if I had my way, where you try to hire people at the ground level and then raise them up to where they fit best as quickly as possible, there is little more reason to expect employee loyalty than there is to expect employer loyalty. So we have a stand-off. Nobody trusts anybody, employees are inclined to take their experience and leave, employers become demanding that they have to invest as little as possible in new employees. I don’t know how you break this cycle.

(None of this excuses Clancy’s employer. Hire someone who lives in Callie and likes it here, there are not many places for them to go with their Health Information Specialist training.)

[Cross-posted from Hit Coffee]

It’s actually a kind of funny question for me to be asking since, well, I’m not. It’s summer and so my substitute teaching gig is at an end. My telecommuting job from last year evaporated. I’ve been keeping an eye out, but due to family responsibilities, it’s not easy to find something that fits. It’s also the case that we don’t have a pressing need for the money. Excuses, excuses, excuses.

Despite all of these excuses, though, I am still among the first to say that – with the exception of the retired and those who have household duties (more significant than mine, till the Jumping Bean arrives) – not working is in the overall a detriment to the psyche. It not only makes me less economically productive, but it has a negative effect on my overall citizenry.

Having spent time living among the working poor, and time living among widespread unemployment, underemployment, and inconsistent employment. The difference in culture is night and day. And not because of economic status. Working, to an extent, breeds responsibility. When I lived in a shoddy apartment complex, and a neighbor friend quit his job because he couldn’t get a particular Saturday off, that my taxes might start going towards covering for the fact that he was unemployed did not bother me nearly as much as the effect I knew it would have on him.

I live in a part of the country that is not remarkably well-off. I work in a town (“Redstone”) that is especially struggling. But the unemployment rate in Redstone is low and “Now Hiring” signs are comparatively few and far between. It’s hard not to respect the work ethic involved, especially when you consider the limitations of the kind of lifestyle most of them will ever be able to afford. Those with brighter horizens left, but those left behind continue to work. It’s stultifying, in a way, but it has its own dignity.

One of the stronger arguments of the OWS crowd, in my view, was when they were accused of being lazy or whatnot and in turn said, “One of the things we’re protesting for is finding work!”

Right on.

We recently discussed the European model versus the American one. I’m not attached to the latter, to be perfectly honest. My main concern with looking towards Europe as a model is that I think a lot of what works over there simply won’t work over here. The other main concern is the high levels of unemployment. I’ve heard that rates often compared shouldn’t be and a more apples-to-apples comparison would reveal less difference. If that’s true, then that negates the concern. If that’s not true, then that poses a problem for me and something I want to avoid even if we move in a more Social Democratic direction more generally.

Of all the things that have happened to our economy since 2007, it’s the jobs picture that bothers me the most. The real estate market will work itself out, eventually. The stock market will do what the stock market will do. Inequality is not a primary concern in many of the ways that it is for others. But jobs? I fear that we will lose the work culture and work ethic that I believe has served us well. I fear we will give up. I fear that those locked out of the job market right now will be frozen out entirely. I fear a growing – and permanent – misallocation between the workers we have and the workers we need.

I fear that there is no really good solution to this. Out here in Arapaho, it can actually sort of work its way out, in a way. Cost of living is cheap. People don’t need a whole lot to get by. If the job doesn’t pay enough for them to so do, it’s not too expensive for Washington to help them out. It was the same in Deseret, except in addition to Washington you also had The Relief Society and various other religious initiatives. In other parts of the country, it’s harder to get by with little. Not only because cost of living is more expensive, but in densely populated places comparative wealth becomes more important (you want to live with these people, and not those people).

One of the things I do think we need to move past is the notion of self-support insofar as that government aid to people who work is a problem. Even if they ultimately take out more than they put in. Even if the “We are the 53%” were not mathematically bunk, I think we need to get to a place where it is considered beside the point even if it were true. I feel similarly towards the minimum wage and the implication that people have to be able to support themselves on the wages they get from their employer. They have to be able to live, but whether they make their way from the minimum wage or the EITC or some other subsidization (housing, for example) is less important. I don’t mind some incremental increases in the minimum wage, so long as it doesn’t discourage employers from actually hiring people, but questions like “How is someone supposed to live on $7.25 an hour!” strike me as problematic because if we raised it to what people would really need to live on (to the satisfaction of the people making the statement) would likely incur employment problem.

Of course, also problematic is telling employers that they can pay their employees as little as they like and the government will make sure that the employees get what they need to get by. I’m not sure what the right balance is here.

I do know that, in the meantime, I am hardly the only person who is looking at this as being about jobs. Which is great, and I hope it stays that way.

Mrs. Likko and I were watching our neighbors’ house and pets while they were away on a few days’ trip. It’s reciprocal; they looked after our animals while we were at LeagueFest. We all save a lot of money on kennel fees this way. The neighbors just got an in-ground pool and spa. This is, of course, the very best kind of swimming pool in existence: your friend’s pool, that they let you use.

So the first afternoon they’re gone, Mrs. Likko and I are hanging out in the pool and enjoying the relief from the desert heat. And then we enjoy relaxing in the spa with some cool beverages, as the sun moves down towards the horizon. It’s a nice moment.

Then I look over and say “Holy shit! Where’s my wedding band?” It’s just gone. Not on my finger; I never felt it slip off. Had I lost it while we were out running errands earlier that day? Did it slip off in the pool? A visual inspection of the pool revealed nothing. Had it been sucked into the filter? And is that why when I went back to check on the pool again that evening, I found the spa mysteriously drained and non-functioning?

So now I had two stresses — I’d just broken my neighbor’s brand-new pool in addition to losing my wedding band.

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It’s a long story, but Clancy and I are still trying to get out 5-figure tax refund from 2010. They claim to have sent the check, but we never received it. The next step in the process is to fill out a 3911 form, then wait 6-8 weeks for them to find out whether or not the check was cashed by somebody else. The problem is that I need information from them in order to do so. So I called them today.

Most of the time, when you are calling a company or even a government agency, and all of their customer service agents are busy, they will put you on hold or at least give you the option of being on hold.

Not the IRS. They simply told me that all of their customer service agents are busy and that I should call back at a later date, suggesting Wednesday or Thursday.

The last human I talked to at the IRS was very helpful. I hope to someday get to talk to a human at the IRS again.

In his essays about Fox News and MSNBC, Tod was impressed by Rachel Maddow’s handling of the voting rights issue and how efforts to crack down on voting end up disenfranchising legitimate voters. I was recently reading up on the statewide candidates in my home state. Three of the four major GOP candidates for the chief elections official oppose the same-day registration that residents currently enjoy. So I was a bit curious if they would remind voters that they can same-day register and vote for them if you were so inclined. Only one mentioned it, one of the lower-rent candidates who loved the irony (“Same-day register while you still can cause I’m going to put an end to this madness!”).

My first thought was wondering if this was a case of the party acting against their own interests. I mean, the GOP gets a disproportionate percentage of its vote from the rural areas, and that’s where people might be caught up short when it comes to having remembered to register. But then I remember the motor-voter law by which I registered. So really, anyone with a driver’s license is registered. Which leaves… who? Not the minorities since it’s overwhelmingly white and… oh, Native American. So, in the end, it’s still to the GOP’s electoral advantage*. Also, some college students.

Anyhow, that got me thinking that by making it really easy for people who have driver’s licenses to get registered, without same-day registration are we discriminating against those groups less likely to drive? Of course, if so, one solution is same-day registration, but I don’t like that solution. But if we’re going to make it really easy for one group, having it harder for another does strike me as at least a little problematic. To be honest, though, I have never registered any other way, so I’m not sure how burdensome the process is for non-drivers. Unless the answer is “more burdensome than for a driver’s license,” I’m also not positive what the answer to that question means, in any event.

The state GOP’s opposition to easy voting also applies to mail ballots. That likely would benefit Republicans with the rural voters for whom driving into town to vote is a real sacrifice. The benefits for Native Americans would likely be mitigated by the notorious unreliability of the mail service in the reservations (not that the USPS doesn’t deliver, but address constancy and actually checking the mail are both issues). I’m not sure about the college students. Back when I was in college, I had to drive home to vote, but that has since changed. If it’s the case here that they can vote outside their precinct, that strikes me as easier than figuring out what to do if a mail-in ballot was sent to your home address. If not, then not.

(I’m relatively indifferent to same-day registration, but absolutely opposed to primarily mail-in voting.)

One of the reasons I’m (slowly) working my way through the great and politically important cases in the Supreme Court’s history can be seen in high relief in a New York Times/CBS poll released today:

Just 44 percent of Americans approve of the job the Supreme Court is doing and three-quarters say the justices’ decisions are sometimes influenced by their personal or political views … Approval was as high as 66 percent in the late 1980s, and by 2000 approached 50 percent … Thirty-six percent of Americans said they disapproved of how the Supreme Court was handling its job, while 20 percent expressed no opinion. Though the court’s approval rating has always been above that of Congress — which is at 15 percent in the latest poll — it has occasionally dipped below that of the president. … The court’s tepid approval ratings crossed ideological lines and policy agendas. Liberals and conservatives both registered about 40 percent approval rates.

I see the Court here as something of a stand-in for the entire judiciary and by extension of that, a proxy for the rule of law itself. The law and the courts through which the law translates into our real lives, must be considered worthy of our respect and trust else we stop being a nation under the rule of law and become something else, and I am wary of what that something might be.

The canary looks a little woozy to me. It’s certainly not dead yet and there is no reason for despair, but something isn’t as it ought to be. Aren’t we, as a culture and as a people, losing something precious when our attitudes towards the bench shift so much in the span of a single generation?

Erik’s post on pop culture and conservatism reminded me of something I meant to write about but almost forgot. This involves spoilers of the first episode of the new TV show Scandal, a political drama.

One of my observations about politics and television/movies is that when explicitly conservatives or Republicans appear (or characters are identified as conservative or Republican), they usually do so in order to validate the liberal or anti-conservative worldview. Usually by (a) being a villain, (b) being shown up, or (c) being specifically set up in contrast and conflict with the bad kind. There are exceptions, but they are few outside of comedies. The rule doesn’t really apply to characters where a major part of their role is to be funny.

So I cocked an eyebrow when I watched the first episode of Scandal, when the first client of the program appeared to be a very conservative individual (“Sully”) who was accused of a crime he did not commit. Well, I wasn’t sure he committed it, as I would not have been the least bit surprised if the “twist” was that he did. Yet it became apparent that he really didn’t do it. And it started to look like he never cheated on her. That he was, actually, as moral and upright as he was initially presented as being. And not funny.

What the hell is going on?, I wondered. Could the Trumwill Rule On Conservatives in Entertainment be wrong? It’s happened, I assume, but I continued to look on with a jaundiced eye. Trying to figure out how this conservative was going to advance the unconservative worldview.

I should have seen it coming. I should have seen it coming! The client was gay and in the closet. And further, the only way he could get out of his jam was to admit that he was gay. So there was the pro forma internal struggle. Then, at the end, there was a nonsensical speech about how he was proud to be gay. I say “nonsensical” not because it doesn’t make sense to be proud of oneself including those parts of you that others disdain. Rather, that it was really quite clear that he was not proud of being gay. That there was a degree of internal conflict involved. But acknowledging this would have gotten in the way of the final scene of a Medal of Honor winner, in uniform, talking about how proud he is to be gay at the end of a press conference.

I poke fun, but I actually liked the show with the exception of the speech at the end, which seemed heavy-handed and didn’t fit. Actually, that wasn’t the only thing to go off the rails at the end, so I’m not sure if the show is a “keeper” or not. We’ll see.

While talking to Pat Cahalan in Las Vegas, he talked about stopping in a town where I used to live and getting completely unacceptable Mexican food. This came as a bit of a surprise to me because I found the Mexican food there to be very acceptable. As he described it, I was pretty sure that he stopped at Taco John’s. Taco John’s is big on putting tater-tots in everything. Then again, so are other places within Idaho and the states around Idaho, so it’s hard to say for sure.

Anyhow, Gustavo Arellano has an article about Mexican food in the US and how American it is:

The most popular restaurant in town that day was Taco John’s. I didn’t know it then, but Taco John’s is the third-largest taco chain in the United States, with nearly 500 locations. But what lured me that morning was a drive-through line snaking out from the faux-Spanish revival building (whitewashed adobe and all) and into the street. Once I inched my rental car next to the menu, I was offered an even more outrageous simulacrum of the American Southwest: tater tots, that most Midwestern of snacks, renamed “Potato Olés” and stuffed into a breakfast burrito, nacho cheese sauce slowly oozing out from the bottom of the flour tortilla.

There is nothing remotely Mexican about Potato Olés—not even the quasi-Spanish name, which has a distinctly Castilian accent. The burrito was more insulting to me and my heritage than casting Charlton Heston as the swarthy Mexican hero in Touch of Evil. But it was intriguing enough to take back to my hotel room for a taste. There, as I experienced all of the concoction’s gooey, filling glory while chilly rain fell outside, it struck me: Mexican food has become a better culinary metaphor for America than the melting pot.

Back home, my friends did not believe that a tater tot burrito could exist. When I showed them proof online, out came jeremiads about inauthenticity, about how I was a traitor for patronizing a Mexican chain that got its start in Wyoming, about how the avaricious gabachos had once again usurped our holy cuisine and corrupted it to fit their crude palates.

In defending that tortilla-swaddled abomination, I unknowingly joined a long, proud lineage of food heretics and lawbreakers who have been developing, adapting, and popularizing Mexican food in El Norte since before the Civil War. Tortillas and tamales have long left behind the moorings of immigrant culture and fully infiltrated every level of the American food pyramid, from state dinners at the White House to your local 7-Eleven. Decades’ worth of attempted restrictions by governments, academics, and other self-appointed custodians of purity have only made the strain stronger and more resilient. The result is a market-driven mongrel cuisine every bit as delicious and all-American as the German classics we appropriated from Frankfurt and Hamburg.

I’m all about equal opportunity. I love actual Mexican food. I love Tex-Mex. I love the bastardizations of Taco Bell and Taco John’s. We have a Taco John’s here in Callie, but not a Taco Bell. TJ’s is more expensive, but has better ingredients. If you don’t mind the tater tots. Which are actually not bad tater tots, especially if they’re right out of the pan. If you can deal with the incongruity of a tater tot infused burrito.