Dana Blankenhorn

The coming labor shortage

The papers are filled with stories bemoaning unemployment.

The job market does suck right now. Kids are growing up more slowly and experts bemoan that.

Well here's what the experts won't tell you. The kids are all right. And we're heading for a labor shortage.

Some areas of the economy are already short on trained hands and minds. Health IT, the field I cover at ZDNet Healthcare, has a severe labor shortage. This is going to become far more generalized across the economy over the next decade.

The current unemployment situation is temporary. People who have jobs are being worked harder than ever. It's part of the deflationary spiral we are in -- salaried employees are getting virtual pay cuts. There is also a startling disconnect between the skills many people have, and their location, and the skills some employers need.

These things tend to work themselves out. Fact is there are immense opportunities in today's economy. There is a need for green energy and insulation services not being met. Our infrastructure is crumbling, and that's a need. Chronic conditions and an aging population guarantee big needs for health workers. Getting capital to these opportunities is a short-term problem.

But over the longer run, seen from the perspective of the next two decades, we will have bigger and bigger labor shortages, in all industries, at all levels. Baby boomers want to retire, but there aren't enough younger workers to replace all their roles. And there certainly aren't enough younger workers to clean out our leaking bodily fluids as we head for that great dirt nap in the sky.

If kids are growing more slowly -- and parents who spent the last 20 years scaring their kids about the evils of society deserve a lot of the blame -- that's going to even out. They're likely to live longer. They're very likely to be working longer, because they will be needed, and because the physical demands of work fall with each generation.

So chill.

Toward the Cloud

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 29 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Over the years I have had nearly as many desktop PCs as cats.

We counted last night.

Kaleidocat (below, in 1979), Nuisance, HeyCat, Lo Meow, McDummy, FurPur, Salem and Rosanna, Indy, Missy, and the incumbents, Midget and Foxy Roxy.

My first PC was a Kaypro, shown on the right in 1983.

I thought it was sweet. CP/M, two floppy drives, an 8-inch green screen, and a case that, while it claimed to be "luggable," was really more like the tube-and-parts cases my dad's TV repair shop had in the 1960s. It weighed 26 pounds. 

Then came my IBM PC, bought for a project that became Harbinger EDI. I upgraded it with a hard drive, and then bought a no-brand AT. There was another no-brand (built from parts) bought for Windows 3.1, another (a Gateway I think) bought for Windows 95, and I seem to remember buying another for '98. Then there was the current box, another no-name built from parts, bought in 2004.

So that's 12 cats and 8 PCs. Of course I'm not counting the laptops I've owned, at least a half-dozen in all, or the four PCs I've bought for the kids.

The desktop era ended this week with my latest purchase, an MSI A6200 laptop I had first seen in the hands of a model at last year's CompuTex show. It's more powerful than any desktop I've owned, and today's "docking stations" are just boxes that sit to the side and let you connect anything else you want with USB ports. That means I can replicate my old desktop environment, with an extra monitor, a fancy keyboard, an external mouse, nice speakers.

It's a turning point. Where once I always needed two machines -- one for here and one for the road -- now I get it all with one. The new laptop cost less than half what my old Kaypro did, $700 against $1,800. And the software cost is also lower than ever. Windows is (unfortunately) bundled and everything else is downloaded, free.

Anyone involved in this business in any way needs to understand why this is so. Moore's Law is the flip and easy answer.

It's also misleading.

College athletics is all politics

The big mistake made by sportswriters looking at college athletics is to over-estimate the extent to which their stories are about money, when they're really all about political influence.

Fact. College athletics does not contribute directly to the education enterprise. All the money that goes in stays in. It's either paid to coaches in salary or goes into facilities. 

For kids, college athletics is a money sink. As more schools find they have to play the political game of college athletics, kids are charged for it.

My own son, now at Georgia State, is having to pay $85 per semester this year so GSU can field a football team. Why? Because football makes them a player in the legislature. It means they're no longer just a "commuter school" but a big-time competitor for funding alongside Georgia Tech, Georgia Southern and the University of Georgia.

That's what college athletics is about. It's about winning the loyalty of legislatures for the rest of a school's agenda. When the big state school dominates the headlines, it dominates funding. That's the money sportswriters should be following, not the TV contracts but the appropriations.

The Blitz of the Gulf and the War Against Oil

What has happened in the Gulf, what continues to happen, is not Barack Obama's Katrina. Nor is it anyone else's. It's not Pearl Harbor, nor is it 9-11.

What it's most comparable to, in terms of American history, is the London Blitz.

(I don't like using AP or even linking to them, but the picture on this page, by the APs Charles Riedel, is becoming the Iwa Jima Flag-on-Mount-Sirabachi moment in this disaster, so I've thumbnailed it. Historians know that an earlier group's arrival on that mountain, with a smaller flag, was the real deal to the men fighting there, and the second flag was put up for show. Yet it's that one we remember. As we'll remember Riedel's Laughing Gull. I entirely agree with AOL's Matt Mendolson on that.)

For most Americans the Gulf is distant. This can be hard to believe but it's true. Even here in Atlanta, where I live, the impacts for now are slight. My neighbor won't be heading to Destin any time soon. Beyond that life remains normal.

This is how America was during the Blitz. It was something happening elsewhere and to other people. What most today have forgotten is that, for many Americans of that time, this was highly desirable. War was highly controversial.

What President Roosevelt did, what Barack Obama needs to do, was to mold public opinion, slowly, toward a war footing. The movies which appeared and were green-lighted in 1940 were not all propaganda pieces, as they would become in the succeeding years. But many did take the gathering darkness as their subtext. And in that era, movies were the dominant medium.

Today the Internet is the dominant medium. It is a medium that is very difficult to dominate. Anything with the taint of propaganda is taken with a grain of salt. Yet, as we see time-and-time again in the Middle East, propaganda gets through.

It gets through when the target is clear and the aim is simple. The Administration's problem lies in its targeting.

The oil is not the enemy. Even BP is not the enemy. The enemy is the system that makes this eternal search for oil necessary, and that makes it the path of least resistance for BP's profit.

I'm not naive enough to think that we can flip a switch and create a world of bullet trains and windmills.  But I'm unwilling to accept the inevitability of oil, and all the bloodshed and destruction that entails.

What has people down right now is just this, the idea that we have no choice but to drill and fight, fight and drill, in order to continue our way of life. That's why the President's approval ratings are down so far, I believe, because his sights are set too low.

Raising those sights means creating a political environment in which an energy bill that moves incentives decisively from carbon to renewables is seen as patriotic, as a jobs bill, and as simple common sense, so that any opposition is seen as unpatriotic. In the face of Big Oil the President has been acting as Chamberlain at Munich, pushing back slowly hoping for "peace in our time."

He needs to become Churchill, not against BP but against the system that made this disaster inevitable. 

The Lesson of Van Gogh's Ear

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 23 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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It is said that Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear because he couldn't sell  his stuff. And that he never did. (Image from Wikipedia.)

The great artists of the 20th century learned this lesson well. Picasso, Dali and Andy Warhol were all relentless self-promoters. They knew that art which isn't seen does not exist, and that an artist's personal style is what he sells during his lifetime.

Somehow, we've gone backward in the era of the Web.

The lesson of my run-in with Chris Buzelli and his friends is clear. No Web site can use a thumbnail of someone else's art without the artist's express permission. This is what artists say they want.

It's self-destructive.

Technically, this position even prevents links. If I write a piece of HTML code linking to a graphic image, and give the a href command properly, my browser will go to the location of that image and copy it, in the size I specify, onto the page I'm writing.

That's the way HTML works.

But to self-important artists if I write such a link I'm a thief. I'm a double thief, because I have not only stolen  art but bandwidth  to display it on my Web page. Thus you don't even link to art without permission.

What galls me is that artists believe they don't have to watermark, they don't have to use robots.txt, they can post their stuff completely in the clear. Ghanaians know to protect their images (try downloading an image from this page) but American artists can depend on webmobs.

The default with images is, don't touch, don't link. So we don't. I won't.

My purpose in writing today is not to litigate the question of legal right. Nor even the moral right to link. I won't link to anyone's copyrighted image henceforth, without a Creative Commons license or a Wikimedia address. Neither will anyone at CBS Inc., nor, I gather, any other media outlet.

Instead I'm arguing that forbidding links, or thumbnails, is counter-productive. It's as dumb as Nikkei forbidding links to its home page or the London Times charging for access.

It's as stupid as Van Gogh cutting off his ear.

Journalists in FoxLand

If this century teaches any lesson above all others it is this.

It doesn't pay a decision maker to listen only to what you want to hear.

George W. Bush did. He destroyed himself by it. He refused to take delivery of news from Iraq, or New Orleans, or the housing market, that differed from his world view. He actually seemed to believe he could create his own reality.

We paid for it.

Ich bin ein Blogger

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 18 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Recently one of the publishers I work for called with good news. I was being named a contributing editor. I was no longer "just" a blogger.

Well, thanks but no thanks.

I have been using blogging software since 2003, when the folks at Corante gave me a free store front. In late 2004 they introduced me to ZDNet, and I'm now doing pretty well, especially since their parent company (CNet) was bought by CBS Interactive.

But that's not the point.

The point is that journalism companies hire bloggers and later claim they are "promoting" them to journalists. They're not. It's not a promotion.

Defending an Atlantan

Having lived in Atlanta for nearly 30 years, I have been witness many times to the degrading attitude my original hometown of New York takes to this place.

Of course, it's the same attitude New York takes to every other place in America. It looks down at us. It assumes a right to define us, to buy and sell us, to treat us as its economic and cultural subjects.

New York does not know best. You have only to look at the fate of Turner Broadcasting in the hands of Time Warner to know that. CNN is crap. The company disinvested in The Cartoon Network, which had been successful, for short term gain. It's sad, and I know Ted Turner would agree.

Usually Atlanta falls meekly under the gaze of the Big Apple. At least white Atlanta does. Black Atlanta -- that's something else. You don't see black rap or R&B artists kowtowing to their New York counterparts. They have succeeded in bringing a little power down here, and that's actually good for everyone, white and black.

Something similar has finally happened in TV thanks to Tyler Perry. He came here less than 20 years ago from his birthplace of New Orleans, penniless. Now he's worth a great deal of money. He has built his own production studio on property formerly owned by Delta Airlines in southwest Atlanta.

Asynchronicity

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 17 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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A study from the Pew Internet Center says 88% of teens with mobile phones text, that one-third text more than 100 times per day, that it's now the most common way for them to communicate.

OMG, say parents. WTF? Kids are, like ROFLMAO.

What's going on is now a generation-long trend. Asynchronicity.

(The illustration here is from John Suler's very fine 2002 work, The Psychology of Cyberspace.)

Most electronic messaging is, by its nature, asynchronous. That is, the two parties don't need to be together in time or space for communication to happen. (When we're doing things at the same time, that's synchronous. Asynchronous is its opposite. Hence asynchronicity.)

As we become busier, by choice, by habit, or because we have to, the need for asynchronicity naturally grows, and the desire for better forms of asynchronicity grows as well.

As Suler's article notes, asynchronicity is just one aspect of how our lives change in a cyber world. Suler calls such things as disassociative anonymity, invisibility, and solipsistic interjection part of  The Online Disinhibition Effect. It's supposed to explain why we flame, participate in web mobs, and do other things we feel distant from but which have immense impacts on our targets.

All true, but it's asynchronicity which, to me, is the most important skill to master.

A Web Permission Engine

It is insane that it is easier to use someone's text, or a video, than a thumbnail of art on a blog post.

(Artist Chris Buzelli, in the center of this thumbnail, taken when he was judging an art competition in Houston, launched a jihad against me last week, calling me a thief. His friends did as well. They very nearly got me fired, although admittedly I did not handle myself well.)

Artists' bleating aside, I am no thief. Crediting and linking to the source of a thumbnail is just what Google does. It's legal. The "whole art" is not being "taken." A thumbnail is being displayed and linked-to. The artist is being credited. (I usually like to find a place where the art is being sold before using a thumbnail.)

Still, if an artist doesn't want their work to be circulated, if they don't really want to be part of the Web yet have a Web site at the same time, that should be their right.

I just want to know beforehand. I have a right to this. To say, "assume the answer is no" is not good enough. Because that not only censors writers regarding popular art, but art that wants to be publicized as well.

My biggest problem is this nonsense of requiring human interaction before another site owner can know what the deal is. The result is that known artists prevent the work of unknown artists from seeing the light of day, and determinations of artistic merit are made by agents, by elites, not by the people. In the end even good artists are victims in this system.

So how can we tell the status of a thumbnail, in such a way that those who think their thumbnails are art can "protect" them, while those who want their work publicized have a way to reach the market?

A Web permission engine is my modest proposal.