Job posting - by Brent

At work we are about to hire another engineer to provide mysql/linux medical claim support. The position has finally been approved and a co-worker of mine put it on craigslist. He sent me a link and I decided to browse around at the other jobs available and found this one:

Novell Technical Support w/ Certifications (Denver,Colorado)

JOB REQUIREMENTS:
We are currently recruiting Novell Certified Support Technicians (Engineers) for a 6 month contract-to-hire position. Candidates must be Novell Certified.
This position entails heavy phone experience, you would potentially be making 200 - 400 calls per month, and the calls typically last 2 - 4 hours.
The company is a fantastic organization located in Englewood, CO. Relocation is not provided.


At first glance this seems like a regular job. I then decided to do the math:
200 calls X 2 hours = 400 hours
400 / 24 = 16.6667 days
On a good month at this job you will only be on the phone for the equivelent of 16.66667 days. If this were done in 8 hour shifts you are looking at working 50 8 hour shifts a month, and mind you...this is on a good month.

If you happen to work a bad month:
400 calls X 4 hours = 1600 hours
1600 / 24 = 66.6667 days
On a busy month you will be on the phone for close to 67 days, or 200 8 hour shifts for the month.

All I have to say is I hope they pay extra for OT.

Brent's guest post on the economy

I can't listen to Glen Beck or Sean Hannity without being horribly annoyed because they always distort the truth to further their neocon views which lead to government expansion.
In this video, Glen Beck doesn't understand the very graph he is trying to explain. He said that it was "the amount of money that we print and have in the system at any given time", however this isn't even remotely the case. If this were true then around 2006 Bill Gates personally owned nearly 10% of the currency in the system.
The "amount of money in the system" which causes inflation/deflation is the amount of printed (or physical) money multiplied by the amount of money created through the fractional reserve banking system multiplied by the rate at which it circulates. Right now we are hitting a severely deflationary market despite the fact that the incompetent Fed is trying to print their way out of a global depression. The reason for this deflationary period is three-fold.
1. Because of the housing/lending financial bubbles popping, which is leading to bank failures and the derivatives markets crashing, large quantities of money are being lost from the system (the fractional reserves portion of our currency). No physical money has been or will be lost in this process.
2. As a result of the recessionary/deflationary economic times people are attempting to hold on to more of their money slowing down the circulation and therefore deflating the currency.
3. When deflation kicks in businesses can't afford to expand and therefore make more cuts again pushing us further into deflation. As confidence drops, money is pulled out of the stock markets which is a combination of created currency and circulation gone crazy. This is leading to an all around nose dive of the total amount of money we have in the system.
So despite the fact that the Federal Reserve is printing up large sums of physical currency, they haven't even come close to printing at the rate that we are losing it. As that graph of printed money is shooting up like a weed, the amount of money in the system is dropping like a rock. Until the day when those numbers pass each other, we will see deflation rocking the United States so bad that we will be begging for the affects of inflation to kick in. Anyone in debt will basically be stretched in a financial torture rack. Anyone with a stable job and even the slightest ability to stay out of debt will be able to weather the storm rather favorably. During this time, cash will be king.
We will learn to live and cope with the deflationary market as did past generations during the Great Depression. Then one day inflation will sweep through our system like Australian wildfire incinerating the deflationary demon and completely devouring all wealth from anyone but the wise and prudent. On that day only hard tangibles will have value and the dollar will be used for toilet paper.