The Situation Inside The Republic
Spoiler Alert: I have been hired to make an argument on behalf of mike_c in the forum. This may seem as though it came "out of nowhere" or "happenstance" to the uninitiated, but nothing could be further from the truth. The Republic exists. The Republic is sovereign, and it is the only surviving sovereign. No amount of pretending that the Republic isn't a thing because "What's an IRC channel anyways?" will ever make the Republic less sovereign. This means the bulk of bipedal biomass, without regard for whatever title they may have been fiated ouside the WoT, is locked out of the forum. For some previously unaligned folks at least one path of submission and education is open. For those who thought they knew better than the Republic, the screw turns and the ratchet locks.
How the potential for future advocacy work in this vein looks is uncertain until mike_c's case plays out, and even then I don't expect all outside the Republic to suddenly start submitting at once.1 For having been hired with a substantial payment in advance, a payment that reflects the value of voice in the forum to those in the unfortunate position of finding themselves in the punishment gazette, I've got a job to do until the job is done. This hiring absolutely will not end the ongoing crawl of presently unaligned parties for opportunities to apprentice into a career, but the search will defer to carrying out this job.
To my knowledge this is the first time someone who has found themselves unfortunately located on the WoT map through notable absence during turbulent times in the Republic has submitted to make payment in public for the service of a Lord's voice to argue their case in the forum. For being the first, he didn't agree to the deal for any sort of discount. Instead for his firstness, I allowed him to increase his own cost to retain my voice in exchange for his getting to designate another party politically aligned with the Republic in good though not lordly standing to receive a portion of what he's paying. As the screw turns, still later comers are unlikely to enjoy this advantage of firstness.2
Shortly after mike_c agreed to pay for my voice, I received my first applicant to Qntra School from a presently quiet member of the L2 in good standing according their WoT position.
Participating in the Republic's forum, defending the Qntra fief, and escaping the zone has lead to opportunities finding me inside the Republic while I have conducted an active search outside the Republic. Despite the large hallucinatory population of walkers that refuse to know better, despite the lazy and absent who neglected the Republic hallucinating some greater obligations they had, as Sovereign the Republic imposes its structure on the world. Who outside the Republic in 2019 can ask tens of Bitcoin for a bit of advocacy work only to see the customer insist on a still more expensive cost structure before they commit to pay for a voice's time?
The Situation Outside The Republic
On hanbot's suggestion I will present how I've been conducting my search for work opportunities outside the Republic and why. I'll start by repeating what I've been looking for in gigs outside the Republic with a hint of how the search has been going.
- Opportunities To Learn Skills Through Apprenticeship - In practice this means putting my pitch in at a lot of datacenters looking for work specifically as a technician and entering a skilled trade. It means I've been been spending some time every week at the Cowork looking for networking opportunities where I can get the word out that I'm considering a career pivot towards work adjacent to the legal profession.
- Locations Outside The Zone Greatly Preferred: After an abysmal response rate where the few responses attributed their disinterest in myself as goods for lacking their special snowflake language in my present linguistic armory, I did indeed fire off roughly a dozen pitches to datacenters in less shitty parts regions inside the zone.
- Among Location Outside The Zone, LATAM Preferred - This means datacenterguatemala.com got my pitch before anywhere in Asia did. No they didn't reply, but their advertised speed on dedicated and colo boxes suggest they plug colo customers into ISDN lines. It also means that I've made a few inquiries at "Institutos" that teach English as a second language that happen to be in reasonable walking distance so far.
But, let's get to the meat of the search. How am I crawling datacenters? I look a the map, pick a county that seems well located, and I search for anything that could be advertising itself as a datacenter. After I put my pitch to a datacenter a line gets added to the running census file. Let us consider the lines present for Costa Rica:
ADN Datacenters Costa Rica
RackNation Costa Rica racknation.cr
CyberFuel Costa Rica cyberfuel.com
RackLodge Costa Rica racklodge.com
DatacenterCR by itech Costa Rica datacentercostarica.com
CRServers Costa Rica crservers.com
And now Serbia:
Ninet Serbia ninet.rs
Beotel Serbia beotel.net
Netcast Serbia netcast.rs
Versus the apparently healthier looking situation in Poland
PCPD Poland pcpd.pl
Artnet Poland artnet.pl
Exea Poland exea.pl
Dataspace Poland dataspace.pl
E-mouse Poland emouse.pl
WEBDEV Poland kolokacja.radom.pl
Beyond Poland beyond.pl
DatacenterPPNT Poland datacenterppnt.pl
SNP Poland snpgroup.com
Talex Poland talex.pl
Sinersio Poland sinersio.com
TPnets.com Poland tpnets.com
Asseco Poland assecods.pl
Kylos Poland kylos.pl
Connected Poland connected.pl
Polcom Poland polcom.com.pl
Artnet Poland artnet.pl
3s Poland 3s.pl
Atman Poland atman.pl
Datahouse Poland datahouse.pl
Lim Poland limdc.pl
All three of these countries were silent. Do you know what country had a high response rate in terms of at least letting the pitch start a conversation?
Anacondaweb Chile anacondaweb.com
WireNet Chile wirenetchile.com
OpenHost Chile openhost.cl
PowerHost Chile powerhost.cl
InterCity Chile intercity.cl
Hostname Chile hostname.cl
Chile did. More conversations with datacenter operators that have operations in Chile were started than there are datacenters that caught the 'Chile' label on this list. Since my last crawl of the datacenter space in 2017, the biggest change has been the growth of small chain datacenters in Latin America. It simply happens I ran into these operators' in other parts of LATAM before making it all the way down to Chile.
Since the number of replies went plural the response rate has been between 10 and 12.5 percent. This rate is anyone who send any sort of acknowledgement that they've received a pitch at all. The datacenter sweep will continue and be published in total as a census, it would be nice to find a shop to apprentice into some skills at. I will be publishing more notes on the search and my methods applied so far to the search, but...
One Point Must Not Be Buried Any Further
There is more opportunity inside the Republic than outside. Inside the Republic does not have to mean inside the Lordship, as may folks who made bitter exits after finding the bar happened to rise higher they appeared to have that year during a revision. Those who have walked away buttmad saw their opportunity space shrink despite the ample space for active members of the L2 to find opportunity by continuing to engage the Republic instead of hallucinating the option to pretend the Republic won't grow without them and some sorta opportunity space exists in Pantsuit land.
During my last years in the zone it wasn't uncommon for McDonalds franchisees to hold "job fairs" attracting hundreds while they maybe hired dozens. Sure there's some sorta dole stamp that apparently requires creating a paper trail to show the dole dispensers that the recipient on that particular dole are "looking for work", but... the US I grew up in was not that poor. When the Hard Rock Cafe was preparing to open in Montevideo they held a job fair at the Kibon which drew thousands of applicants for... dozens of openings. With Pantsuitist "compliance" burdens... fiat enterprises are stuck in a junk market that forbids them from meaningfully sorting the applications stack on their way to a hire.
At the same time applicants without a WoT presence stuck applying to fiat businesses face long odds their application finds itself in front of a human reader after the "compliance" filters are applied. Every year these long odds ratchet up from "church cake raffle" type odds to lottery like odds. The one thing no one at all needs is headcount for the sake of headcount. Some kinds of fiat enterprises hire headcount because for every 30 heads they put on the payroll, they may get one or two capable of doing the job in a way that allows the business to survive until the next, still larger, still lower return intake batch.3
The evidence so far seems to suggest that the minimum number of applications that need to be sent in order to conduct a respectable job search for entry level positions is somewhere between 500 to 1000. If there aren't 500 operating businesses in the space you want to enter, you've got to start getting flexible on what kind of career you want to have..
- One thing Qntra gives me substantial practice with is seeing how the timeline is going to play out. Someone needing to hire a voice in the forum to extract them from an unfortunate situation they lazily let themselves fall into seemed like an inevitability for quite some time. Knowing when the seemingly inevitable will unfold is a much less certain business. In between the seemingly inevitable need to come and the inevitable's arrival is an abundance of space for crises of faith. [↩]
- Some potential comers like Charlie Shrem... the ones who signed the papers... what case could ever be made for them?
It is mike_c's good fortune that however earnestly he may or may not be working in his fiat employer's best interests... that particular Barry Diller property has gone from being able to present itself on the surface as a maybe popular thing to readily appearing abandoned at the most superficial glance. By all appearances he got the opportunity to take money from IAC to work on a property that was already well doomed.
In Shrem's case I can't see any way to represent a man who sung to a Preet even at a 100% fee. By contrast in mike_c's case, for his absence he'll never be working directly with Mircea again and the luster his once rising star had during the War of Life days almost certainly never return. Unlike Shrem, mike_c can interact through the WoT. He can't do so as a peer but he can sit with the other folks whose time in the light has passed and maybe even find himself a productive member of the L2.
At this point I realize I seem to have forgotten to run !!rated before re-rating mike_c. My old rating was "-1 mike_c 2019-02-15 04:02:18 Made good things, disappeared, appears to have ended up going the other way" which isn't a great rating too have, but so far I've treated -1 as a sort of caution flag rather than an outright civic death sentence. [↩]
- What do you suppose the "seasonal hiring" device employed by fiat retailers is? During my time at the Home Depot seasonal hires were done by the dozens and they happened months in advance of the actual part of the season where business ticked up. By the time the actual busy season rolled around, just about every department was back to their pre-Season headcount with the surviving "seasonal hires" replacing atrition losses. Only cashiers were batch hired year round, presumably because without a WoT... finding someone who won't rob the cash drawer even when they know they are on camera... is a challenge.
For a good orientation batch of a dozen, one hire still employed at the two month mark is a good outcome. Two hires surviving to the same two month mark is an exceptional outcome. [↩]
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