Blackcap Blog

Published at 07:59 on 13 July 2016

Those who most need help finding employment are those new in the market for a particular line of work, either as a result of recently graduating from school or a mid-life career change. But recruiters are hired at the behest of* the employer, and candidates with no experience are common as dirt, meaning employers need no special help in finding same. The candidates employers need help finding are those with specific, specialized experience.

But recruiters lack that experience, too, which seriously limits their ability to judge and match candidates with positions. Moreover, the positions being recruited for tend to pay better than the job of recruiting for them, so this state of affairs is inevitable. Thus if you’re an experienced candidate, recruiters are still of little or no help; they’ll just pester you with false lead after false lead.

I speak from experience here, having at one time been a freshly-minted CS graduate and now being a senior-level programmer. It went from recruiters being uninterested in me to me being uninterested in the (inevitably mismatched) opportuinities recruiters pestered me about.

Given that, is it any surprise that the low road dominates in the recruiting industry? Why seek people with any knowledge at all to recruit in a field? Just hire the cheapest workers in India you can find, even if they can barely speak coherent English.† They’re fated to do a bad job anyhow, so why even try? After all, doing a good job isn’t the point. Your business model is based on both candidate and employer making an unwise decision (i.e. to use you), not on providing value to either.

This leaves out the recruiters hired by busy employers whose staffing departments are themselves understaffed, of course. But when sleaze dominates an industry, the odds aren’t good. So if I see a recruiting agency’s name on a job listing, I pass. And when one cold calls me and leaves a voice mail, I just delete the message.

* Note I did not write “paid by”. That is because they are not. To claim otherwise is to state what I call the Recruiter Lie. Does anyone think employers have an unlimited orchard of money trees to harvest for paying wages and salaries? Of course not! They budget those costs, and the cost for paying recruiters ultimately comes out of the same pot for paying wages and salaries. One will come at the expense of the other.

† Which, given they are the cheapest, will be the case; competent English speakers will seek more honorable and better-paying work.

Published at 17:54 on 12 July 2016

In related news, the ocean is salty and it was another dry day in the Sahara.

Really, this is about zero surprise. Sanders isn’t dumb; he knew where he stood. He just wanted to maximize his influence in the process, and the point of no return had been passed: the good he did by pulling Hillary to the left was being cancelled by how his non-endorsement of Hillary was sowing division and thereby helping Trump’s chances.

And as distasteful as Hillary is (and her role in destroying democracy in Honduras is reason enough to dislike her), she still has one huge thing going for her: she’s not Donald Trump.

Published at 08:07 on 12 July 2016

I had planned on picking dewberries and blackcaps on the Toandos Peninsula last weekend. I know of a good spot for both there.

But fate intervened and ruled that option out, so I went to a revegetating clear cut where I have noticed a lot of berry plants before in the Green Mountain State Forest instead. That resulted in a different harvest, as most of the berries I found there were red huckleberries instead.

They’re a new one for me. Oh, I’ve snacked on them many times, but never set out to harvest them and bring a quantity home with me. The jam turned out great: I followed the “low sugar” recipe, using a tad more than the recommended amount of sugar because the berries are naturally tart. For the same reason, I opted not to add any lemon juice to the recipe, figuring there was plenty of natural acidity to set the pectin.

The result was tangy and flavorful, just like the berries it was made from.

Published at 08:16 on 11 July 2016

The claim that they have is in fact predicated upon some very racist hidden assumptions, as I shall now explain.

Police have been shooting unarmed Black men for decades and getting away with it. Until the era of social media and smartphones, such killings were inadequately documented and typically didn’t receive coverage outside of the local media.

Now that technological progress has changed both of those facts, the killings are getting nationwide attention and sparking well-deserved outrage. And it is those reactions that inspire the claim that race relations have gotten worse under the Obama presidency.

Race relations, in other words, are being judged to be more acceptable when suspicious killings result in passivity and widespread social acceptance than when they provoke outrage. Society is judged to be running off the rails not because racially-correlated killings are happening (again, they are nothing new), but because those being killed are no longer passively accepting this, as is apparently their duty.

In turn what does this imply? Obviously that Black people must be inferior. Such a belief only makes logical sense if Black lives aren’t as worthy of news coverage or outrage, much like the lost life of a young raccoon or opossum who dies as a result of a car running over it doesn’t warrant the news coverage that a human child suffering the same fate should.

And if it’s not racism to assert that it is the duty of some races to realize they are inferior and to passively acquiesce in this inferiority, then I don’t know what is.

Published at 08:57 on 10 July 2016

After exhibiting curious silence about a police shooting of a Black gun owner who was dutifly complying with police orders while legally carrying a concealed weapon, the NRA rushes to vociferously condemn the murder of the police officers in Dallas.

Link here.

Because, of course, the Right is (contrary to its professed aims) neither pro-individual-liberty nor anti-big-government. They have no problems with big government when big government is doing things they personally like, and are frightened of individual liberty when it applies to people doing things they personally dislike.

Published at 16:23 on 9 July 2016

Recently, it happened yet again. One of my old banes, canker sores, materialized.

Those who don’t suffer them don’t understand how bad they can be. The weeks of lost sleep due to the pain is probably the worst of it. Over the years, I’ve discovered various ways of both minimizing the chances of their happening* and the pain once they do.

But that’s not a complete solution. Recently I heard about honey showing promise as a treatment, so I decided to give that a try. I was a bit skeptical: wipe the sore clean and dry, then briefly apply honey after each meal, that’s it? The exposure to honey for a under a minute several times a day can do that much?

But darned if it didn’t seem to actually work. Of course, it’s only one trial, so it could all be nothing but coincidence. Time will tell, but as of this stage it seems promising enough to be worth reporting about.

* Which means finding out which sorts of foods cause allergies to trigger the sores, then avoiding them. Plus, avoiding toothpaste that contains sodium laurel suplhate has helped.

Published at 08:07 on 8 July 2016

It really should not come as a big surprise that something like this would eventually happen in a society as racist, militarist, and armed as the USA. It was inevitable.

The question now is: will it work? It’s an unpleasant fact that sometimes violent tactics work when non-violent ones don’t. The system values some lives more than others, so the loss of some more-valued lives might end up prompting the sort of action that the loss of less-valued ones failed to do.

Or it might just as easily provoke some sort of backlash. Most likely, it will do bits of both, much as the “propaganda of the deed” era circa 1900 did. History is a messy process that doesn’t precisely correspond to anyone’s pet theories or values.

Published at 08:06 on 7 July 2016

It’s something most people, even Marx’s biggest ideological enemies, don’t get: ideological flexibility (and the lack thereof).

Marx theorized that the proletariat, who had everything to lose under capitalism, would therefore be motivated to be the most open to alternatives such as socialism and communism. Conversely, those who gained the most from laissez-faire capitalism would be motivated to be its most rigid and staunch defenders, and prevent any reform from being possible.

Intrinsically unstable, capitalism would proceed to tear itself apart as the swings of the business cycle inevitably got more and more dramatic and the great masses of the proletariat became increasingly immiserated. When Marxian socialism would finally be tried, it would almost immediately outperform capitalism; even though central planning might have its inefficiencies, those would prove far less destructive than capitalism’s wild swings. Socialism would prosper while the capitalist world crumbled and ended up in history’s dustbin.

But it didn’t work out that way. Huge chunks of the proletariat clung to traditional social structures and refused to even entertain the idea that something different might be to their benefit. At the same time, the bourgeoisie proved to be something less than totally rejecting of the idea of making changes to the laissez-faire formula. Some were worried about the consequences of unrest (which was building, despite falling short of revolution) harming them. Some thought they could profit from regulation by influencing it. Many thought both.

In short, the proletariat was not so ideologically flexible and the bourgeoisie so ideologically rigid. Both sides had (and basically still have) an intermediate (and approximately equal) level of flexibility.

It’s something that this story brought to my mind this morning.

Published at 07:14 on 6 July 2016

Remember this guy? I griped about him spamming me last year. Well, he’s still at it, with basically the same form E-mail.

Insurance recruiters are only a thin notch above Nigerian advance-fund scammers.

Published at 23:07 on 30 June 2016

Not really.

I’ve been working on a set of command-line utilities to let me post here without using an interactive browser. Reason is that WordPress is infected with excessive amounts of crap Javascript, to the point that its editor window is nearly useless if one doesn’t have a solid high-speed connection. Which I often don’t while commuting on the ferry.

Anyhow, two idiots have conspired to make my life more difficult than it needs to be. Both have used an object containing actual or implied time zone information to represent an XML-RPC date/time stamp (which doesn’t contain any time zone information).

Idiot No. 1 wrote the WordPress XML-RPC code (or the PHP library that uses same), and Idiot No. 2 wrote the Apache ws-xmlrpc code. Both idiots made feeble and ultimately failing attempts to defeat the lossage their idiocy begat, and I’ve spent most of the evening puzzling out the gyrations necessary to reverse engineer then counteract the lossage caused by both the base design flaw and the ineffectual original countermeasures… on both the client and server ends.

Yes, I’m being uncharitable and abrasive by calling those programmers “idiots”. You would too if your temper had just been worn thin by dealing with bizarre behavior caused by a stupid design decision.