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.

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.

It’s sort of a trick question. First of all, a colostomy is an operation that routes your colon to a hole in your side so that you can…well you know. There’s a bag and all that.

Anyway, according to this really interesting New York Times article, people are happier when they know the worst has already happened than when they’re not sure if things are going to get better. In other words if you know your colostomy is permanent, you’re happier than if you think it might not be.

Did that make sense? The point is this. We’re so miserable right now not necessarily because of what is happening (we can adjust to that), but because of what we fear might happen.

We don’t know where it’s going to end and that’s killing us.

My suggestions is this. Accept that things are only going to get worse and deal with it. In other words adjust to a level of misery that you haven’t experienced yet, and if it happens, you’ll be prepared. If it doesn’t, you’ll be shocked and elated, sort of like I was when the Phillies won the World Series last year.

In other words, find joy in the fact that your life is going to get much worse.

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.

Just a Cold War then. I lived in Germany. Nobody ever shot at me. I stood on the border once between East and West and dipped my toe over the line while East German machine gunners in a tower watched my wife through binoculars. I traveled all over Europe, except for the side where I wasn’t allowed. I hated the Army, but never regretted the decision for a minute.

So do I have a point? Yeah, maybe. Why sink 30 grand on an MBA that will probably mean squat in the long run? Ride out the recession by taking a chance. Do something bold. Screw career progression and all that crap. Recover when the economy recovers. If you’re really so brilliant, you’ll find a way.

In the meantime figure out a way to do something different and fun.

I got out of the Army at 31. I was an enlisted guy with a Master’s degree in Information Systems by then. I’d been to all kinds of places. I climbed up inside big golf balls and repaired satellite dishes in Japan as a civilian for a year, drove like a madman through the streets of Istanbul after that. And eventually had a decent career. I started out at 30k. Believe it or not that was considered big money back in 1987 for a guy that age.

Yeah, maybe I could be a hotshot laid-off businessman now with a BMW sitting in my big garage right now instead of a Sentra, but so what? Being conventional sucks.

Now back to the geekmba360 blog. It’s a really good blog, and I totally understand the desire to be successful in life, but as the great food critic Anton Ego says in Ratatouille, “What we need here is some fresh perspective.” I’m just trying to provide some.

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.

I never really understood the whole credit crisis thing that got us into this mess, but now I do because I watched this brilliant bit. It’s 11 minutes long, but it’s brilliant in its clarity. It takes something very complex and makes it quite clear.

And very depressing.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

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.

Thirty states have struck such deals with banks that include Citigroup Inc. (NYSE:C) , Bank of America Corp. (NYSE:BAC) , JP Morgan Chase and US Bancorp (NYSE:USB) , an Associated Press review of the agreements found. All the programs carry fees, and in several states the unemployed have no choice but to use the debit cards. Some banks even charge overdraft fees of up to $20 — even though they could decline charges for more than what’s on the card.

“It’s a racket. It’s a scam,” said Rachel Davis, a 38-year-old dental technician from St. Louis who was laid off in October. Davis was given a MasterCard issued through Central Bank of Jefferson City and recently paid $6 to make two $40 withdrawals.

The banks say their programs offer convenience.

Although the banks are doing this out of kindness to help you during these extremely stressful times, it turns out that as a side effect, they’re actually making a killing on the scam plan.

In Missouri, for instance, 94,883 people claimed unemployment benefits through debit cards from Central Bank. Analysts say a recipient uses a card an average of six to 10 times a month. If each cardholder makes three withdrawals at an out-of-network ATM, at a fee of $1.75, the bank would collect nearly $500,000. If half of the cardholders also dial customer service three times in any given week (the first time is free; after that, it’s 25 cents a call), the bank’s revenue would jump to more than $521,000. That would yield $6.3 million a year.

In case, you’re not quite getting how the banks are making things convenient for you, the next snippet oughta clarify things.

Arthur Santa-Maria, a laid-off engineer who lives just outside Albuquerque, N.M., said he didn’t pay any fees the first time he was laid off, for several months in 2007. His unemployment benefits were paid by paper checks. He found a new job last year but was laid off again last fall.

This time, he was issued a Bank of America debit card — a “prepaid” card in industry lingo — but he was surprised to learn he had to pay fees to get his money. He asked the bank to waive them. It said no. That’s when Santa-Maria called back to ask how to check his account online. He logged on and saw that the call cost him a half dollar. To avoid more fees, Santa-Maria found a Bank of America ATM at a strip mall and withdrew $80 at no charge. When he got back to his car, he decided to take out the rest of his money — $250 — and deposit it in his bank account.

Afterward, Santa-Maria logged on to his account and saw a charge of $1.50 for two withdrawals in one day.

You see now? If you make two withdrawals in one day, you’re being inefficient with your time, so the bank punishes you for your own good to teach you not to make two withdrawals in one day and thus be a more efficient person. The banks aren’t scamming you with unnecessary fees they’re improving you through operant conditioning.

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

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.

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.