Here’s the great news as reported in the New York Times: “expectations for the future are improving in scattered areas…”

It’s amazing what passes for good news these days. For instance, if only 400,000 people are laid off in a month as opposed to the previous month’s five, or as opposed to the expectations, it’s somehow good news. It’s like your doctor giving you the great news that instead of 30 more days to live you actually have 40. Wonderful.

But maybe this is how the recovery begins. Every little sliver of hope is reported and commented on and these slivers become the story and people start believing, and then it reverses itself. Sliver by sliver.

So let me start it. It’s official. I have a job starting in two weeks. The recession is coming to an end. Pass it on. The recession is coming to an end.

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I’ve been playing around with calling it Depression 2.0. Others call it the Great Recession. But Jeff Jarvis, the author of my new favorite book, “What Would Google Do,” calls it a great restructuring. You’ve got to listen to the guy. His book is fantastic, and everything he says is terrifically interesting. The book isn’t really about Google, it’s about thinking about information and how it gets around and how you can provide it and consume it and make it work for you. It’s about becomming a platform.

All the old ways of doing things are dead, like the many many millions of trees the newspapers have killed since man became smart enough to print. My only disappointment is that he doesn’t have an English accent. Since he worked for the Guardian I thought he would. I should also mention that by linking to a video and showing it on this page, I and the organization that posted the video, are following the author’s teachings, one of which is “do what you do best and link to the rest.” But there’s a lot more than that. And also, in this case, he actually is talking to Google, and indeed arguing with them at one point about what they’re doing in China. This is long and thought provoking.

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Here’s a well-written blog that offers good practical advice for young educated professional people trying to ride out the recession. I can’t relate to it because I’m not a young professional person, and I’m not about to enroll in an MBA program or go for a law degree, and if I were 24 right now, I would probably be more likely to do something daring and fun, like joining the Air Force and going off to one of our wars (yeah, I’m a little weird that way and never would have considered doing this when I actually was 24).

Come to think of it, I was 26 during the Reagan recession, the last time we saw unemployment of these levels, and after working at a donut shop and a printed circuit board factory with my Writing degree and my 3.7 cum, I did join the Army. [read more…]

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This site isn’t fancy, but it’s got a lot of good info on avoiding scams aimed at the laid off.

Most of these schemes are perpetrated by sleezeballs. Of course, whether or not you’re laid off, your own bank isn’t averse to scamming you. I got two bogus checks in one day from a couple banks.

One was from Nationwide (who apparently aren’t really on my side), where I have a money market account, and the other was from one of my credit cards. (Wish I remembered which, but I tore them up so fast I hardly noticed.)

It works like this. They send you a check, in Nationwide’s case it was for about 8 bucks. It looks like free money, except that if you cash it, the 8 bucks actually goes as an installment payment on some kind of credit protection plan or something like that.

On the back of the check you find the fine print which tells you that by cashing the check you’re agreeing to blah blah.

In other words, it’s nothing more than a trick to get you to sign up for something you don’t need and don’t want that makes the bank lots of money. Which is why they’re so eager for you to have it.

Yeah, most of these scams are perpetrated by sleezeballs.

Anyway, Laid Off Guy is doing a good deed.

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Just because they caused the recession doesn’t mean the banks aren’t going to nickel and dime their victims to take advantage of it. According to the AARP bulletin, banks are happily allowing states to direct deposit your unemployment checks, and the banks are happily charging you fees to get at the money. This is done for your convenience, of course.

For hundreds of thousands of workers losing their jobs during the recession, there’s a new twist to their financial pain: Even as they’re collecting unemployment benefits, they’re paying bank fees just to get access to their money. [read more…]

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Visit the Dead Company Club to see the amazing list of companies that no longer exist.

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According to the article in the Wall Street Journal, some people are getting way better unemployment benefits than the rest of us. They’re benefiting from a program that President Kennedy started, and President Obama just beefed up, called Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA). Apparently it’s intended to help people who lost their jobs due to foreign trade. Eligibility becomes a real judgment call.

According to the article, very few people qualify.

A tiny slice of America’s jobless currently receives the benefits — some 50,000 people, out of more than 5 million now collecting unemployment checks. But an examination of the TAA program and recent awards suggest that the pool of potential beneficiaries could be far larger. With new unemployment claims at a 26-year high and the program expanding, the number of applicants is poised to jump.

The point of the article isn’t to tout the benefits of the TAA program, but rather to point out that the American unemployment system is a bit a of a mess.

Mess or not, you should get what you can, so why not see if you’re eligible for TAA benefits.

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Here’s an article called 7 Lessons from the Meltdown. Good stuff. It’s got all the basic victims, the one losing her house, the one who lost his job and can’t find another, the one who’s deep in debt and can’t get out. Etc.

So I’m wondering. Is this a depression, a recession, a meltdown, all three, or some combination of the two?

Or are we experiencing a recession resulting from a meltdown?

Are we still melting down? Or have we stopped melting?

Are we in the congealing stage? Are we a ruined wax candle, a shapeless blob?

There’s another guy in this issue of Kiplingers who says things can still go much lower, that stocks can go down way further. So maybe the blob will melt more. Maybe someday there won’t be anything left but a flat slab of hard wax, a burnt wick, some ugly matches, and … and what (my train of thought was just interrupted by Comcast calling to pester me about adding services I can’t afford and don’t need).

Oh well, you get it. Melting.

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My hatred of the word “utilize” goes back to my Army days, but I’ll skip that and just put in a plug for Big Daddy Cool’s blog for the underutilized worker. The writing’s great, the posts are long, the site is fun, the attitude is good, even though he hasn’t worked in over 6 years (well not in a real job anyway), and this post where he actually defends American autoworkers in particular is full of fire, ire, and insight.

Here’s a quote: (Jolie-884782 is someone he found on the Internet sparring with someone else)

Jolie-884782:

I would love to see nothing more then you out of job.

That last comment is the most unpatriotic thing I have ever seen or read in my life! What kind of a person do you have to be to wish that someone, ANYONE would lose their job. What Jolie-884782 doesn’t get is that it doesn’t stop with the loss of a job. What Jolie-884782 is saying is that they want everyone at GM, Ford and Chrysler to lose their jobs, to lose their health insurance, to lose their homes, for their children to go hungry and for their loved ones to be put in harm’s way. That is what Jolie-884782 is really saying. What kind of a person do you have to be to actually wish that on innocent children?

Actually you don’t have to be a person – you just have to be a monster.

Yeah, and there’s lots of people like that, happy to see people who belong to organizations they don’t like out of jobs.

Oh and about the blog, there is one problem. The text is very light and hard to read.

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This is from Recession Wire, not as funny as the Unemploymentality post, but the same sort of vivid writing I love to read.

In my industry, print publishing, the wheels came off so fast that many of my colleagues were stumbling about the countryside, bruised and dazed, before they realized they had been in a train wreck…

It’s an article about retraining mostly and reinventing yourself, something way too many people are trying to do right now, and how the federal government might be able to help.

And this here’s an article that says stinking unemployment is now 8.5%, and that’s just the ones they’re counting. It’s a lot worse. It’s rising, and no one has a clue when it will stop.

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You know, you read some bad stuff on blogs, and sometimes you read pompous moronic crap by people trying to pad their writing resumes (he resists urge to link to example), and sometimes you read stuff like this from Unemploymentality, my pick as the funniest blog in the recession blog genre.

So here we are – the broke, the downtrodden, the wretched. Scratching and clawing at job boards, networking like rabid dogs and ‘trying to squeeze a dime out of a nickel when we haven’t got a cent.’ At the end of each long week, dozens more resumes have been sent out without as much as a phone interview while you’re one more week closer to the end of your unemployment.

Now I know that rabid dogs don’t really network and that only the psychotic are actually clawing their Monster results with their fingernails, but hey, this blog gets the point across. It’s funny, but it’s serious, too.

Plus they’ve got the hipster Olympics on their home page, which I will resist the urge to steal and post on this site.

And what WILL you do, when the unemployment runs out?

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Our dentist is a nice guy who tells really bad jokes, so I’m glad to hear dentists are thriving in the recession. Here’s a quote from Time.

The one guy is 63, just lost his job at a health insurer, and is afraid he’ll never find another one. The other has three kids, one in college, and lost his construction job. The stress caused them to grind their canines and molars. So they each wound up in the office of Dr. Woody Oakes, a dentist from New Albany, Ind., with a fractured tooth.

It’s not just that people are grinding their teeth in misery (and I’m glad I’m not one of them yet), but they’re losing benefits and letting their teeth rot, then running to the dentists in pain. Or they fear for their jobs and they’re rushing all their dental work in before they’re stripped of their salaries, their benefits, and their smiles.

I wonder how doctors are doing. Ill-health should be up, but visits might be down. We’ll see what happens when Cobra benefits start expiring.

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