Across the Water

Mount Rainier, as seen from the deck of a Washington State Ferry. A longer lens would have come in handy here, but one must make do.

Whispers

File under: You don't say...

A local source said the target was a room allegedly used by Hamas police.
Air strike on Gaza school kills at least 13 people

When I saw the headline, I knew that somewhere in the story, there would be an accusation that Hamas was using the building for something or other. It's pretty much a given. Such rumors serve the Israelis, in the sense that the deaths of civilians can be laid at the feet of Hamas. But they also serve Hamas, because Israel is more or less guaranteed to act on them, which generates sympathy for the Gazans throughout the region, and with people who understand that the broader Palestinian public is on the receiving end of a raw deal in this war. Accordingly, it would be interesting to find out the identity of this helpful "local source," although I expect we, the general public, never will.

I would say that the number of civilian casualties of the fights between the Israeli Army and Islamic militants has always been high, but that presumes that this really is a fight between organizations, rather than populations, and there are times when I'm not at all sure this is true. While those people who consider themselves civilians on both sides of the conflict may feel that it's inappropriate for the other side to target them, I'm not sure that the broader Israeli and Palestinian populations still buy into the idea that there are innocent people among their opposites.

Back in the Google+ days, one of my contacts found it ironic that people considered fighters legitimate targets, but not the civilian populations that supported them. I suspect that this opinion is more widespread than people are prepared to concede. Israel faces criticism, because it's considered to have a professional military that should be able to minimize the overall death toll, and the government says that it tries, but I wonder if their hearts are really in it. Hamas has earned the designation of a terrorist organization for making it pretty clear that, as far that they are concerned, there are no innocent Israelis; the events of October 7th of last year, that kicked all of this off, were proof enough of that. But it also appears that they are willing to see everyday Palestinians be in the line of fire. It's said that every orphan is a future Hamas fighter, but it still seems like a remarkably high price to be willing to pay. The death toll among Palestinians is always higher than that among Israelis; Hamas' tactics seem destined to result in a continuous attrition of the population of Gaza. And Gaza simply can't win a lopsided war of attrition.

Xáat Kwáani

 

An Alaska Airlines 737-800 in its "Salmon People" livery. Seen at SeaTac Airport on July 4th.

Hands Off

 

I wonder when stores will return to a model of effectively being basically pickup locations, where customers were not able to browse the merchandise.

If you'd told me, prior to my going into Target, that socks and underwear were a major target of shoplifters, I would have thought you were pulling my leg. Yet, here we are. Row after row of locked cases for Fruit of the Loom and (perhaps ironically) Pair of Thieves.

I'm not at all tied in to the lives that most lower-class Americans lead. That's why I have no idea why anyone would bother shoplifting undergarments in large enough amounts that the Target store I was in had them on lockdown. And perhaps that's a problem.

Of course, I understand that poverty is a problem, and a situation that makes many people both desperate and cynical about rules. And so it made sense that people would steal baby formula; it's expensive and it's not hard to find a buyer who won't ask questions. Likewise with laundry detergents; nearly everyone uses it, and the chance to get it below MSRP is attractive. And I presume that something similar applies to socks and underwear. But I'll admit that I'm guessing. Maybe people are simply starting to find the prices of boxers to be out of reach of their budgets.

And I suspect that I shouldn't be guessing about it. Not because there would be a news story on it, if I just channel-surfed long enough, but because it's a bad thing for people on different rungs of the economic ladder to be completely out of sight of one another.

Insubstantial

So the latest tend story to be bandied about in my LinkedIn feed is that of "Ghost Jobs." CBS News had a piece on them last week, citing a June survey from Résumé Builder. But the topic goes back farther; the BBC posted a story a couple of months ago, and financial services company Clarify Capital conducted a survey in August and September of 2022, and updated their story last October.

The findings of the surveys, such that 43% of employers used "ghost job" listings in 2022 to "keep current employees motivated, and this year that 62% of employers wanted to "make employees feel replaceable" are, predictably, prompting reactions.

But, as a contact of mine on LinkedIn pointed out some years back: Whenever you see something that outrages you, stop and think.

The Clarify Capital survey had 1,045 respondents, who are simply described as "managers" who were surveyed about Ghost Jobs. Résumé Builder outsourced their survey to the market research firm Pollfish, who put together a cohort of 649 hiring managers who completed the survey. "To qualify for the survey, all participants had to be over 25, have a household income of at least $75,000, have an education level above high school, have a manager-level role or higher, and work at a company with more than 10 employees. Respondents also had to indicate that they are involved in hiring at their company via a screening question."

And that's it. That's all we know. No data on company size or location, industry. No information on weighting or margin of error. According to the North American Industry Classification System Association, there are upwards of 1.5 million businesses operating in the United States with 10 or more people. To conclude, as Clarify does, that "1 in 5 managers [didn't] plan to fill open job positions until 2023," or, as Résumé Builder does, that: "4 in 10 Companies Posted a Fake Job Listing This Year" is to presume that the self-selected cohorts of respondents for the surveys are representative of the overall business community. But there's no good reason to presume that.

So I'm going to borrow a line from FiveThirtyEight, and label this a "Bad Use of Polling." The surveys don't really say anything useful because there's no way of relating the findings back to the actual business environment. In fact, they don't really even define "Ghost Jobs." Clarity Capital implies a definition, but doesn't actually give one, and Résumé Builder mostly uses "fake job listings," and CBS does the same, saying "or 'Ghost Jobs'," but nothing more.

This is becoming a story because it plays on the anxieties of worried job seekers, concerned that they're spending precious time chasing roles that don't actually exist. And packaging up anxiety to present peoples fears to them is how websites generate views and advertising impressions. And because there's no actual useful data behind any of this, it's just amorphous enough to provoke worry. But I think that it also affirms people's general suspicions that corporations are up to no good, and toying with people for their own cynical ends.

So are there enough false and misleading job postings out there that someone needs to take action? Maybe. But no-one knows; the surveys don't tell us.