At Last! October 15 Carnival of the Capitalists is Here!

Has it really been four years?  Yes.  Yes it has.  Here we are, on the 210th edition of Carnival of the Capitalists, celebrating the anniversary/start of a fifth year last week and this week, on the anniversaries of the first two weeks that Rob and I hosted.

CotC is now the oldest continuously running blog carnival, as the original carnival and inspiration for CotC, Carnival of the Vanities, has stumbled in a much expanded and niched world of blogging.  We were the inspiration for subsequent niche carnivals, which in turn inspired others, to the point where sometimes I wonder why we persist in a world of so many carnivals… so little cachet.  Still, it’s cool being senior, a pioneer, an inspiration, and seeing others come and go. 

Sometime I regret never having found a way to turn a buck from CotC, or having not picked the obvious idea for a centralized home of blog carnivals off the floor, dusting it off, and running with it until that could make a buck.

This edition was supposed to feature a link to my resume and promote the fact that I am job hunting.  Bear in mind that I have not created a resume to get into a company since 1994, and not created one for internal promotion since 1997.  In some ways not much has changed, but in others it’s a whole new world.  In 1994 I mailed resumes and nobody had heard of Craig, that Monster critter, Linking In, or any of that.

I am not done doing a fresh resume, so a resume in progress will have to do.  Currently it is based on my 1994 resume, with jobs and a summary prepended, and for the web my address and phone removed.  Feel free to return to that URL, as I will put the new resume up as I build it.

On that page, at least for now, I have also included my LinkedIn profile, which needs tweaking but was at least created recently.  A while back I did a series of posts here on my experience, centered mainly on computers, programming, and especially software experience, cross-linking using an embedded Expression Engine template, and culminating with a resume-like employment and college post, and an initial attempt at listing out experiences and accomplishments.

Whatever I find for work, it cannot preclude running CotC, blogging, or doing work on the side.  Obviously I’d love something that would make that last unnecessary.  Hey, it could happen…

Oh right, you’re here for the entries.  Guess I should get to them!  In no particular order except more or less when they were received…

Gaizer.com looks at the factors prospective investors look at when evaluating the opportunity you present in Analyzing the Deal.

Sophispundit wrote a microeconmics paper, now presented as a post, analyzing the efficiency the newspaper business once fulfilled and what has changed to render Newspapers Relegated to the Dustbin of History.

Planning to have some software created or a similar project done for your business?  Steve Lohrenz addresses a topic dear to me, where I’ve been on the wrong side of personal experience, as well as having read folks like Steve McConnell.  Find out what are Characteristics of Freelance Projects That Get Done.  I could add pages to his post, but it’s a good start.

Web Worker Daily is a favorite daily business/geek read of mine, which I found through Mike Gunderloy, whom I learned of originally because I read Note-It Posts, the original blog of his wife Dana.  I can’t recommend the entire site enough, even if you are not a web or remote or code writing worker, but one post seemed meant for CotC, so I took the liberty of entering it.  In the course of migrating halfway across the country, they encountered the famous Wall Drug, inspiring 4 Branding Lessons from Wall Drug.

What do Supreme Court justices know about securities and business?  Professor Bainbridge notes the answer is not so much.  That is Why the SCOTUS Gets Securities Cases Wrong so Often.

Business Opportunities and Ideas is frustrated with a company that can get away with overpromising due to barriers to entry, deriving good advice from the experience in We Solemnly Promise to Let You Down.

Jay Deragon believes that Business Uses of Social Technologies have barely begun to be realized.

This one seems borderline as far as being on-topic, but is a question that comes up periodically.  In my actively Libertarian days circa the mid-eighties, I often felt guilty for attending a subsidized state college.  Even before that, the first time I was ever on unemployment, when it was very much as described in the song Free Ride, I felt so bad about it I didn’t go back after the first four weeks.  A Response to “Accept Help” is a post at rocket finance about government assistance in capitalistic societies, when and whether to use it, and the distinction between expecting and accepting help.

Small Business Buzz talks about Advertising Your Product on Stage.  You knew product placement was big on TV and film, among huge companies, but there’s more to it than that…

The famous crash of 1929?  Nope, 1907… surely you’ve heard of it?  You have now.  October 2007: The 100 Year anniversary of a 37% Market Crash is a book review at The Dough Roller, noting similarities between 1907 and today.

At Software Project Management it’s all about Money as a Motivator… or not?  In management class you learn about the various motivations, and money is just one.  I think of it as the base factor.  We all need it, and will take some form of work to get it.  From there, though, there are other factors that might impact exactly what we’ll do, how far we’ll strive, and how happily and willingly.  If money weren’t the base factor, I wouldn’t be looking for a job, but rather doing exactly what I want and any money derived would be gravy.

Sox First notes the potential for differences in Personal values, organizational values, which can be the source of ethics scandals.

The Legislative Bias Against Savings borders, at least, on off-topic personal finance, but the government does indeed skew economic and financial priorities by promoting some forms of savings (and other things) over others, a point Queercents rightly gets us pondering.

Lenin and Goebels both spoke of turning a lie to truth through repetition.  I recently pointed out an article about mistaken consensus, a form of cascading failure.  Businesspundit reminded me of all that with Our Bias Towards BS and Lousy Decision Making.  Good advice to improve your evaluation of facts and resulting decisions.

Daily Idea is a great site you should all visit regularly, and one of my favorites so far has been How to Avoid Meetings that Suck.  If you don’t care to watch the video, the entire transcript is in the linked post.  Still, it’s not very long, so I’d watch it, and when you’re done you might also check out How to Sleep Better and Become an Early Riser, an earlier Daily Idea video that made me laugh while conveying good information.

Weekend Pundit warns us to Prepare for the Upcoming Electronic Apocalypse, which apart from the sheer absurdity from an engineering and practical aspect, is a cautionary tale about “blunt instrument” regulation, and about the world’s economic interconnectedness allowing regulations in another part of the world to affect us more than you might expect.

The Digerati Life looks at the economic implications of strong versus weak dollars in Profit From The Weak U.S. Dolla With Currency Plays And Other Strategies.

Does anyone besides me and Rob Sama watch Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares?  As I noted in my commentary about the first episode, it’s a business show, not a food show.  Food merely happens to be the product, and not the important element in turning the troubled businesses around.  Last week’s episode was the best yet from the perspective of multiple business problems, and is a cautionary tale about working with family and the deep seated influence parents can have on kids in or affecting a family business.

Do you play favorites with employees?  Are you sure you don’t?  How about the precedence given to employees with children, and their need to handle emergencies?  It’s all too common for that not to be offset for the childless, causing resentment.  That a more subtle form of favoritism, and the one that particularly struck me in Management mistakes: Playing favorites over at Blog Business World.  The post also hit home in that I was once technical supervisor to people who had become close friends and, to the extent it mattered in my position, had to pointedly avoid favoring them.  Of course, that worked the other way too, getting extra effort because I wasn’t just Joe Random Boss…

Econbrowser looks at Speculation and fundamentals in oil prices, examining the impact of the futures market and other factors.

Radiohead and… ancient Greece?  Leitourgia isn’t the latest equatorial disease, or something that makes prisoners divulge information, or even the latest management fad.  As explained in Leitourgia and Radiohead at voluntaryXchange, it was a common practice in ancient Greece, akin to Radiohead’s modern act of supplying a freely downloadable album.

Who Moved My Client Base is an excellent guess post from Small Business Trends, highlighting the use of social media to turn around and grow a struggling locally oriented business.

Wally Bock points out that retaining people is important, not just attracting them, in Great workplace programs aren’t enough.

And that’s another Carnival of the Capitalists.  Next week’s host will be Blawg Review, home of the well known law blogging carnival inspired by CotC.

The following week is due to be hosted at a blog being started at PartnerUp, but after that we trail off, apart from a blogger or two I need to correspond with regarding the possibility of hosting.  Feel free to see this page and volunteer.

Posted by on 10/16 at 03:14 PM

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