naked capitalism

fresno dan says:

Are those real bears? And were they really standing like that? And was that picture taken at jellystone national park?

Skippy says:

Re: Wall Street’s Near-Death Experience Andrew Ross Sorkin, Vanity Fair

I feel mentally violated upon viewing its content in so many ways.

Skippy…LEAD deposits seem *almost* a sound generational investment compared to GOLD.

mangy cat says:

math by robots is like quant trading
five and a half million now grows exponentially to one million next year?

Michael says:

forget robots … what about poeple?

this story didn’t seem to get much coverage, so far:

“It is really hard for me to comprehend that in the next 50 years, we’ll have to produce as much food as we have ever produced in human history.”

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/09/30/2701245.htm
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26146751-26103,00.html

LeeAnne says:

missing link here

NTB says:

best… antidote… ever.

fluffy says:

Re the HuffPo piece about the alleged difficulty in filling some high tech jobs, despite high unemployment:

I can’t help but think that the at least some of the difficulty these firms have in hiring is directly traceable to benighted attitudes about training and human resource utilization. Someone in the article states that even if they hired an ex-IT person, he or she “would be no good for a year” because of the presumed learning curve on building codes or other esoterica related to alternative energy.

Is that really true, or is it just that, once again, companies treat training as Someone Else’s Problem, naively assume that their industry or their company is unique, and refuse to invest the time or resources in growing good employees via training or “hiring talent” rather than just attempting to poach employees from competitors.

Sure, in some industries, like IT, experience has become the coin of the realm. But that was not always so, and this focus only on narrow skill sets is particular damaging in new technology fields. Go and read in Where Wizards Stay Up Late how ARPANet, the grandfather of the Internet, was built. Few, if any workers had any real experience in what was then a brand new field — but they hired the smartest folks they could find, irrespective of background and it worked. No one really knows how to build a technology until it is built, and I would think that any sort of cutting-edge alternative energy start-up would know this.

Employers are reaping what they have sewn — you treated employees as disposable (and disposed of them whenever it suited), you neglected training, and you told them how lucky they were to have a job while cranking out strategic plans that said, quite openly, that you didn’t know what business you’d be in in five years. And surprise, folks don’t want to invest 100k and up in getting a specialized Engineering job for the few positions whose pay you are cutting even now.

If out-of-the-box thinking is required, I fear for the future of American business.