News from the World of Employment

Last weekend, I finally saw the science fiction movie I, Robot, based on Isaac Asimov's collection of connected short stories of the same title.  Asimov established three laws of robotics that are respected by other sci fi writers: 1. Robots cannot harm humans in any way; 2. Robots must obey any order or request from humans unless it would violate the first law; and 3. Robots can defend themselves unless by doing so the robot would violate the first 2 laws.  US Robotics manufactured and programmed the robots so the laws were part of the permanent programming.  The robots, of course, served humanity by doing manual and menial labor, and being personal assistants (I actually could use a housekeeper/cook robot right now). 

We are not so far away from Asimov's vision.  After all, we have Roombas, those cute circular automated vacuum cleaners known to also be pedestals for cats.  I've heard that there are also Roomba-type lawn mowers.  Robots serve law enforcement and the military, going where it's too dangerous for humans to go.  In the current issue of Time Christopher Matthews writes that the creator of the Roomba now wants to populate offices with robots.  This brings to mind Sheldon Cooper on CBS' The Big Bang Theory deciding to interact with the world through his computer attached to a moving stand while he sat in his bedroom, safe from germs and other aggravations of modern life.  His "remote Sheldon" proved annoying to everyone he encountered.  I wonder how annoying robots in the office environment would be?

But it's not for lower level employees!  The robot will actually be the boss!  Isn't that just what we all wanted?  Its name is Ava, and it's used primarily for conferencing.  However, it can move at up to 3.3 feet per second, and can hear a speaker from up to half a mile away.  No hiding from this thing, folks!  First we had outsourcing which caused a painful loss of American jobs.  Now, robots.

In the meantime, the AARP has published again this year it's top 50 employers for baby boomers, i.e. people over 50 years old.  The Today Show covered this list earlier today, talking about all the advantages to hiring someone over 50, for their experience, knowledge, ideas, and skills.  The problem I've found in my very own job search, however, is that Corporate America and a lot of small businesses don't want to hire older workers because they are more expensive, i.e. they can command higher pay.  In the long run, these workers are less likely to have high turnover, need less training, and end up being a bargain.  It's just as expensive if not more so to deal with a high turnover rate of your employees.  You may be able to pay them less than more experienced workers, but you lose in productivity.  So, why aren't more companies hiring people over 50, for god's sake?

And then there's the ultimate cheap employee that costs only $2000 - $2500 once, needs no benefits, provides high productivity, but needs both IT and mechanical maintenance... AVA, the Roboboss!  Will it have in its permanent programming Asimov's 3 laws of robotics?

A Money Question?

I awoke in a familiar panic this morning, the piercing contraction in my chest with the sinking stomach feeling, shortness of breath, and a rush of heat in my face that produced sweat.  No, I wasn't having a heart attack, although I suppose someone might mistake a panic attack for one.  This familiar panic hits me whenever I allow myself to face the bottom line reality of my financial situation.  It made me wonder if the rich ever have panic attacks about money or do they even think about it?

Why do prices increase year after year?  Is there a point at which they must fall, as in "what goes up must come down," or will they just continue to spiral upward?  How do we stop this upward momentum in prices?  I've had these questions in the back of my mind since I first learned about prices when I was a young girl.  No, I didn't take an economics class at any time during my schooling.  I didn't because to me, everything related to money seems exceedingly arbitrary to me.

I chuckle in bemusement when I hear on the news that the Stock Market rose on favorable economic news or dropped at high unemployment numbers.  People control the Stock Market, folks, and it's the people who are reacting to the economic news not the Market.  It's all about psychology.  The Market could be manipulated if you could find a surefire way to manipulate the feelings and thoughts of all the people, i.e. traders and banks, who control it.  The finance sector, however, does have a basis in valuation regarding companies, their products, their management, etc.  Why is one company valued more than another?  That depends on performance...of the company's employees, management, and products.

Products.  How are the prices set for the products we buy?  There is a certain formula perhaps that relates cost of materials plus cost of labor plus marketing and distribution equals per unit cost.  But how do we establish the costs of all the parts of the equation?  How do we establish the value of something?  Isn't that arbitrary?

Imagine living on a planet rich in gold deposits.  The sentient creatures inhabiting the planet have no use for the gold.  To them, then, it has no value.  Then humans come along and, delighted to find such rich gold deposits, decide they want the gold.  Ah.  Would the sentient creatures give the gold to the humans?  What if these creatures have no knowledge or experience with the exchange of goods, or barter, or money.  What if they are far more concerned about the human presence on their planet and how it might influence their culture?  I tend to agree with them about the humans.  Chances are, the humans wouldn't ask but just take, and then conquer the planet and colonize it for their own purposes, nearly wiping out the native creatures.

I think what I've been struggling with for most of my life is the psychology of money.  Could we ever attain the Star Trek 23rd century ideal of no longer being interested in the acquisition of wealth or material things?  Money, and everything related to it, is now so embedded in the human psyche, in culture, and in life, that I wonder if it ever could be eliminated.  I believe the Star Trek writers understood one thing, however: if humans were no longer concerned with the acquisition of wealth, something needed to take its place. 

Ferengi "Rules of Acquisition" from "Star Trek"

A sad truth: living in America now is far more expensive than it was 35 years ago.  And I keep thinking that it really doesn't have to be so expensive if people re-thought how they valued things.....including how much an employee's knowledge, skills, intelligence and experience are worth.  It's disgusting how little employers want to pay nowadays.....

Snooping

When I was a kid in a small city in upstate New York, a Peeping Tom plagued our neighborhood.  My parents insisted that I close the blinds on my bedroom window before changing my clothes or getting ready for bed.  The thing about this Peeping Tom that made him particularly creepy was that he made no sound.  His stealth made him an urban legend in our neighborhood.  If a woman two blocks away hadn't looked up and seen his face in her window one evening, no one would know that he existed.

Human curiosity motivates human behavior, good and bad.  Our curiosity makes us explorers in all areas of life on this planet.  What we really love, though, is to find out how other people live.  Our rich storytelling tradition illustrates this, but also the darker side of that tradition: gossip and snooping.  We have laws that protect and support the storytelling tradition, and make snooping illegal.  Gossip continues to enjoy popularity until it strays into slander or libel.

Nation states, however, want to know what other nation states are doing, especially regarding them.  Espionage is government-sanctioned snooping.  We have no problem with that as long as the snooping occurs in another country to gather information about that country and its citizens.  For decades, we've lived with a friction between domestic privacy rights and domestic snooping.  J. Edgar Hoover, when he led the FBI, practically made it policy to snoop on people that aroused his suspicions.  Certain behavior could result in an FBI file on a citizen, even someone as naive and ignorant as a college student who writes letters to an American college friend studying in Moscow during the 1970's.

Some cultures crave and value stability and security over complete freedom and democracy.  Others enjoy freedom and democracy, reveling in the free-wheeling discourse that they produce, not thinking too much about stability and security until they are threatened.  The terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001 jolted Americans out of their daily lives and forced them to consider their security as a priority.  As a result, Congress passed The Patriot Act, an ironic name for legislation that allows the government to snoop on its citizens.

For the past 12 years, we've lived with law that ostensibly exists to aide law enforcement in the hunt for terrorists within our borders.  There have been people who were against that law, who warned of possible abuses, who wanted it to be restricted in its scope, and who are probably today nodding their heads and at least thinking "I told you so."  Recent revelations about the National Security Agency's untargeted and blanket accumulation of information from telephone companies and internet providers about phone usage and e-mails in the pursuit of potential terrorists appears to prove they were right.

What has surprised me about the NSA revelations is how shocked people have been by them.  I wonder what those people thought was being done to protect them and the country from potential terrorists?  At the same time, I'm really happy that we now know what is being done, even if that tips our hand a bit to potential terrorists.  It can perhaps send a strong message to them that they will find it difficult to operate within our borders, but it probably won't stop them from still carrying on their activities.  The NSA wasn't able to stop the Boston Marathon bombers.

What kind of culture are we here in the USA?  Do we crave and prefer stability and security?  Or can we tolerate the insecurity of our open society?  Would we have voted for the NSA's measures to protect us if they'd been put to us to vote on?  Or would we have voted for privacy rights?

The police finally caught that Peeping Tom that snooped around our neighborhood when I was kid.  They actually caught him in the act, thanks to an observant neighbor.  Closing my window blinds in the evening became a habit that endures to this day.  And I live on the top floor of an apartment building.....  

Genuine or Scam?

At the end of March this year, I wrote a post about a young German woman who'd arrived in America to vacation with an American man she'd met in Germany when he was traveling there.  One of the women in our group had stepped forward to try to help this young German woman, whom I called Lena in my first post.  They exchanged e-mail addresses and phone numbers.  What happened next convinced our friend that this young German woman had been running some sort of a scam.

Most of us believed Lena's story but we all had questions.  It was truly crazy to make plans to travel with a man she barely knew, crazy to spend hard-earned money to travel to the U.S. with such shaky plans, crazy to end up stranded.  Our friend, Gail, in the week following the German conversation group meeting, e-mailed Lena and set up some sightseeing together.  When Gail picked her up, Lena mentioned that she hadn't used the extensive public transportation system in the Twin Cities.  She'd been here for over 2 weeks and hadn't used the city buses?  What was she doing? 

They went to see the Guthrie Theater, downtown Minneapolis, the Mississippi River, the University of MN, and other sights that were free.  When they stopped for lunch downtown, Lena confessed that she had no money.  No money?  She wanted Gail to give her money.  Gail offered to pay for lunch but not to give her money.  During the lunch conversation, Gail asked Lena if she'd be at the German conversation group's next meeting.  Lena, according to Gail, replied, "Will all the same people be there?"  Gail said, "Yes."  "Well, then, why would I want to go again?"

As the day wore on, according to Gail, she became more and more uncomfortable and suspicious of Lena's motives.  She wasn't behaving like an innocent tourist who'd been stranded at the airport and more like someone on the prowl for an easy buck.  Lena was obsessed about Las Vegas, also.  Gail witnessed Lena on the phone with her mother in Germany, who was arranging for Lena to fly to Las Vegas.  Why couldn't her mother arrange for her return ticket to Germany?  When the group discussed it (and we have several times), none of us can understand Lena's fixation on Las Vegas.  She claimed to be a zookeeper in Germany, interested in America's national and state parks.  So why wasn't she making arrangements to see some of our better known zoos, or national parks, or even the Minnesota Zoo which has a good national reputation? 

Well, after spending a day with Lena, Gail heard from her only one more time -- an e-mail about leaving for Las Vegas.  Lena had told the group that she'd return to the Twin Cities in order to catch her flight back to Germany towards the end of June.  We asked Gail last night if she'd heard from Lena.  No.  Strange.

We are now speculating that Lena wanted to go to Las Vegas in order to troll for high rollers at the casinos.  Perhaps her stop in the Twin Cities was to test out her story and refine it.  Who knows?  None of us believe we'll see her again.  What is sad is now we question Lena's honesty, whether she was genuinely in trouble, whether she was running a scam and looking for easy marks.  How will we react if something similar happens in the future?  Gail is a savvy woman, a world traveler herself, and she is convinced that Lena was running some sort of scam.  Whoever she talked to on the phone may have been her partner in the scam.  Her mother?  Who knows.

At least none of us got pulled into whatever Lena was involved with.  But isn't it sad that we live in a world where this kind of thing can happen and turn out to be far less innocent than it seems?

On Deadline!

Hello!

I was too optimistic about my writing schedule this week, alas.  The deadline for a grant application I'm finishing up is tomorrow -- I've been working on it all week.  So, once again, I've had to put my commentary on the back burner.  I apologize to my loyal readers!  I'll be back next week.

Gina

Credit: Disney