Observe Business

Times are hard right now…everyone holding back, trying to save a few nickels. Spending is down. Everyone wants to hunker down and ride out the storm with a safe (and hopefully cushy) job.

So here comes Business Week with some advice…20 jobs to help you ride out the storm. Sounds nice, right?

Except that EVERY job they list requires lots and lots of study or training. By the time you finish training to be a nurse, or become a database administrator, happy days should be here again. And if they are not, that’s too bad, because you will have this shiny degree, loads of debt and no job. Plus, some of the jobs they talk about, especially those related to computers, are headed overseas anyway.

What Business Week should have done is talk about how you can pick up jobs that require little to no training, such as security guard, truck driver, or hot dog vendor. The St. Petersburg time has a great article on how there is a boom going on in hot dog carts.

There is also a nice business to be done in serving gourmet food from a truck, a step up from the ‘roach coaches’ of yore. A good example is this Belgian waffle guy in New York or these gourmet taco trucks in Houston.

St. Pete Times 1, BusinessWeek 0.

The NYTimes is known for being the newspaper of record. But they are hurting and trying to make the transition into the digital age. Jason Calcanis, a man who made a lot of money on the Internet AFTER the 2001 bust, said newspapers are dead.  So does Henry Blodget, who was a big Internet muckety-muck, fell into disgrace and has pulled off a triumphant return.

So what does this have to do with the ad above, which promotes a not-FDA-approved remedy for wrinkles? It purports to be able to turn a very wrinkly old woman into dewy-fresh young woman with no wrinkles.

The NYTimes paper version charges a lot of money for its ads and has top-notch advertisers such as the Fortune 100. The digital version has to make do with whatever it can scrape up from the bottom of the bucket. They don’t seem to be doing a very good job of targeting, either: I saw the ad, and I am not a woman. I don’t turn off my cookies, etc. I visit the business section and the travel section and the ‘world’ section fo the NYTimes website. But wait…I don’t visit the sports section. So I probably got tagged as a woman. Oops.