This is how important networking is

Take the racial part of the article as gospel truth, with a grain of salt, or disregard it entirely.  But read this part and burn it into your memory:

Favoritism is almost universal in today’s job market. In interviews with hundreds of people on this topic, I found that all but a handful used the help of family and friends to find 70 percent of the jobs they held over their lifetimes; they all used personal networks and insider information if it was available to them.

Source: How Social Networks Drive Black Unemployment – NYTimes.com

Your friends and family and social network may be responsible for most of the jobs and perhaps the best job you will ever have.  The lesson here is that you need as wide a social net as you can have.  And you need to treat those in your network with integrity and fairness.

I have the great job I have now because I made connections with people when I was a teenager, and nearly twenty years later one of them remembered me and introduced me to the lead partner at my current firm.  But for that introduction, I never would have gotten an interview.

I paid it forward, too.  I helped a friend of mine from a former employer get a new job with a firm we work with.  My introduction of him got him an interview he would not have otherwise gotten.

It took me until I was probably around 30 years old to learn that who you know will determine your success in life more than what you know.

So meet people.  Be good to them.  Help them find opportunities.  And when you’re looking for an opportunity, you’ll have a much easier time of it.

Aren’t bullets made of metal?

The whole print-a-gun-out-of-plastic thing is understandably freaking people out.  But I have a question about the following:

Security checkpoints, background checks, and gun regulations will do little good if criminals can print plastic firearms at home and bring those firearms through metal detectors with no one the wiser,”

Source:This Is The World’s First Entirely 3D-Printed Gun (Photos) – Forbes

Won’t bullets set off a metal detector? 

Client-overlords? That’s why I’m a plaintiff’s lawyer

Funny thing about representing injured folks – they’re generally grateful for my help and don’t expect me to shine shoes, fetch coffee, or kiss ass. 

Ivey advises law students to hang out with B-school students, who will be “your client-overlords and referral sources” after graduation. “If you want to make rain later, learn about their nonlegal needs,” Ivey writes. “Pay attention to how they talk and think.”  Source: Law students need to stop talking like a ‘high school babysitter,’ former admissions dean says – ABA Journal

You know all those surveys about how miserable lawyers are?  I bet it’s because most lawyers have to think about the “nonlegal needs” of their “client-overlord” business-school clients.  That and worry about billable hours.

Don’t get me wrong – there’s stress in representing the injured.  But being a plaintiff’s lawyer affords me ample room for creativity, autonomy, and a personal life.  I can’t imagine working for the other side and being treated like “the help.”  Oh wait, yeah I can – I did that for ten years as an IT guy.  And I hated the condescension and disrespect heaped upon me by self-important corporate jerks. 

So in summation, if you’re a lawyer who hates having client-overlords and would just prefer to have clients, try representing the injured.  They’re by and large a much better class of people.

And that’s kind of the point of killing RSS

Note, of course, that it’s the big guys with all the traffic that want to kill it.

Without RSS readers, the long tail would be cut off. The rich would get richer: only the big-name sites get regular readership without RSS, so the smaller sites would only get scraps of occasional Twitter links from the few people who remember to check them regularly, and that number would dwindle.

Source: The power of the RSS reader – Marco.org

Great Quora post on shutting up the Holocaust deniers

Have you checked out Quora?  If not, you should.  It’s a great site where people answer lots of questions about lots of topics.  (I love answering questions about asbestos and mesothelioma.)  This one was e-mailed to me and I loved it because people who try and revise history really irritate me.

No Nazi was ever a Holocaust denier.
This one, simple fact shows that everything the modern deniers try to claim is a post hoc contrivance.  From 1945 onwards, thousands of Nazis were captured and hundreds tried for their part in the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity.  They tried to pretend they were someone else, they tried to pretend they didn’t know what was happening, they tried to pretend they didn’t have as much to do with it as others, they tried to claim they were just following orders and they tried to justify it as “the kind of thing that happens in war”.  But what not one of them ever did was deny it happened.
Even men on trial for their lives, in the full knowledge they would be hanged if convicted, never stood up in the courtroom and shouted “This is all a lie!  This is a fabrication!  There were no gas chambers and no crematoria!  I’m being framed!”  On the contrary, they gave great detail as to precisely how they had helped build and helped run the mechanics of mass murder, some of them even seeming proud of how they had achieved something so complex and on such a vast scale.

Rudolf Höss
A classic example of the kind of Nazi who was not a Holocaust denier when, if the deniers are correct, he should have been was Rudolf Höss.  SS-Obersturmbannführer Höss was commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau from May 1940 to November 1943.  According to Höss’ own testimony and later memoirs, he was summoned to Berlin in June 1941 where he received “personal orders” from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler to turn Auschwitz-Birkenau into a large scale extermination camp, modelled on the facility already operating at Treblinka.  Höss detailed later how he visited Treblinka and then, by September 1941, had established similar gas chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz.

Source: The Holocaust: What are the most convincing bits of evidence which prove, beyond a shadow of doubt, that the Holocaust occurred? – Quora