Here’s the great news as reported in the New York Times: “expectations for the future are improving in scattered areas…”

It’s amazing what passes for good news these days. For instance, if only 400,000 people are laid off in a month as opposed to the previous month’s five, or as opposed to the expectations, it’s somehow good news. It’s like your doctor giving you the great news that instead of 30 more days to live you actually have 40. Wonderful.

But maybe this is how the recovery begins. Every little sliver of hope is reported and commented on and these slivers become the story and people start believing, and then it reverses itself. Sliver by sliver.

So let me start it. It’s official. I have a job starting in two weeks. The recession is coming to an end. Pass it on. The recession is coming to an end.

I’ve been playing around with calling it Depression 2.0. Others call it the Great Recession. But Jeff Jarvis, the author of my new favorite book, “What Would Google Do,” calls it a great restructuring. You’ve got to listen to the guy. His book is fantastic, and everything he says is terrifically interesting. The book isn’t really about Google, it’s about thinking about information and how it gets around and how you can provide it and consume it and make it work for you. It’s about becomming a platform.

All the old ways of doing things are dead, like the many many millions of trees the newspapers have killed since man became smart enough to print. My only disappointment is that he doesn’t have an English accent. Since he worked for the Guardian I thought he would. I should also mention that by linking to a video and showing it on this page, I and the organization that posted the video, are following the author’s teachings, one of which is “do what you do best and link to the rest.” But there’s a lot more than that. And also, in this case, he actually is talking to Google, and indeed arguing with them at one point about what they’re doing in China. This is long and thought provoking.

It’s sort of a trick question. First of all, a colostomy is an operation that routes your colon to a hole in your side so that you can…well you know. There’s a bag and all that.

Anyway, according to this really interesting New York Times article, people are happier when they know the worst has already happened than when they’re not sure if things are going to get better. In other words if you know your colostomy is permanent, you’re happier than if you think it might not be.

Did that make sense? The point is this. We’re so miserable right now not necessarily because of what is happening (we can adjust to that), but because of what we fear might happen.

We don’t know where it’s going to end and that’s killing us.

My suggestions is this. Accept that things are only going to get worse and deal with it. In other words adjust to a level of misery that you haven’t experienced yet, and if it happens, you’ll be prepared. If it doesn’t, you’ll be shocked and elated, sort of like I was when the Phillies won the World Series last year.

In other words, find joy in the fact that your life is going to get much worse.

Who are these people and how do we find them? Craigslist is a cool and very useful website, but of course, the scammers are out there using it to rip off the unemployed.

They post a bogus job ad, then they try to con you out of your personal info when you apply.

And then, you know, they steal you blind.

On a related note, I signed up for AARP not too long ago and created a profile on their website. Much to my surprise I was almost immediately emailed by someone who wanted to be my friend. How nice.

Turns out she’s a poor Nigerian woman who recently underwent a great calamity that had lost her a tremendous sum of money, and she needed my help. There was a lot of money involved. I really wanted to help her, but I just don’t have any to spare at the moment. I did offer her some free suggestions on improving her grammar, though.

Here’s a well-written blog that offers good practical advice for young educated professional people trying to ride out the recession. I can’t relate to it because I’m not a young professional person, and I’m not about to enroll in an MBA program or go for a law degree, and if I were 24 right now, I would probably be more likely to do something daring and fun, like joining the Air Force and going off to one of our wars (yeah, I’m a little weird that way and never would have considered doing this when I actually was 24).

Come to think of it, I was 26 during the Reagan recession, the last time we saw unemployment of these levels, and after working at a donut shop and a printed circuit board factory with my Writing degree and my 3.7 cum, I did join the Army.

Just a Cold War then. I lived in Germany. Nobody ever shot at me. I stood on the border once between East and West and dipped my toe over the line while East German machine gunners in a tower watched my wife through binoculars. I traveled all over Europe, except for the side where I wasn’t allowed. I hated the Army, but never regretted the decision for a minute.

So do I have a point? Yeah, maybe. Why sink 30 grand on an MBA that will probably mean squat in the long run? Ride out the recession by taking a chance. Do something bold. Screw career progression and all that crap. Recover when the economy recovers. If you’re really so brilliant, you’ll find a way.

In the meantime figure out a way to do something different and fun.

I got out of the Army at 31. I was an enlisted guy with a Master’s degree in Information Systems by then. I’d been to all kinds of places. I climbed up inside big golf balls and repaired satellite dishes in Japan as a civilian for a year, drove like a madman through the streets of Istanbul after that. And eventually had a decent career. I started out at 30k. Believe it or not that was considered big money back in 1987 for a guy that age.

Yeah, maybe I could be a hotshot laid-off businessman now with a BMW sitting in my big garage right now instead of a Sentra, but so what? Being conventional sucks.

Now back to the geekmba360 blog. It’s a really good blog, and I totally understand the desire to be successful in life, but as the great food critic Anton Ego says in Ratatouille, “What we need here is some fresh perspective.” I’m just trying to provide some.

You know, I just haven’t felt much like blogging lately. Maybe it’s the endless clouds and rain in the Baltimore area. Maybe it’s laziness or depression or just that I’ve been too busy. I don’t know, but then I came across a guy who calls himself Laid Off Loser, and he had this to say: “It was dog-balls hot in Boise on Monday, so I started my experiment in energy conservation, i.e. saving money on the electric bill this summer.”

What a great lead, and Man, how hot is that? Where is Boise, anyway? Iowa, Idaho, Ohio? It must be really hot there. I guess.

I just had to write a post so I could use dog balls hot in Boise as my heading.

It cheered me right up. Thanks, laid off loser.

Oh, and did I mention he’s wearing a can of spam on the first post?

And how hot is that exactly?

This site isn’t fancy, but it’s got a lot of good info on avoiding scams aimed at the laid off.

Most of these schemes are perpetrated by sleezeballs. Of course, whether or not you’re laid off, your own bank isn’t averse to scamming you. I got two bogus checks in one day from a couple banks.

One was from Nationwide (who apparently aren’t really on my side), where I have a money market account, and the other was from one of my credit cards. (Wish I remembered which, but I tore them up so fast I hardly noticed.)

It works like this. They send you a check, in Nationwide’s case it was for about 8 bucks. It looks like free money, except that if you cash it, the 8 bucks actually goes as an installment payment on some kind of credit protection plan or something like that.

On the back of the check you find the fine print which tells you that by cashing the check you’re agreeing to blah blah.

In other words, it’s nothing more than a trick to get you to sign up for something you don’t need and don’t want that makes the bank lots of money. Which is why they’re so eager for you to have it.

Yeah, most of these scams are perpetrated by sleezeballs.

Anyway, Laid Off Guy is doing a good deed.

I never really understood the whole credit crisis thing that got us into this mess, but now I do because I watched this brilliant bit. It’s 11 minutes long, but it’s brilliant in its clarity. It takes something very complex and makes it quite clear.

And very depressing.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

It’s not just banks that are preying on the unemployed, there’s a whole slew of conniving snakes out there doing their best to restore our faith in the basic rottenness of humanity.

The snakes in question here are identity thieves, who according to this article in the Chicago Tribune, are ramping up their efforts in our time of trouble, mostly through the use of fake job ads and other methods specifically targeted at the unemployed.

With unemployment soaring, identity thieves are increasingly preying on job seekers.

The scams run the gamut from fake help-wanted ads and job-search services to bogus résumé-posting Web sites, part of a new arsenal of weapons targeting millions of recently unemployed people.

“There are so many people out there who are desperate to find a job,” said Linda Foley, executive director of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a non-profit watchdog group based in San Diego. “Unfortunately, identity thieves are taking advantage of people in these uncertain times.”

Whether they are registering with employment agencies, responding to ads, posting résumés or surfing career sites for work, jobless people too often give up their Social Security numbers and other personal data, experts say.

My wife got a letter from someone inviting us to be on some show about wife swapping. They’re interested in families that are suffering due to the recession.

Apparently, she’s not the only one who received the invitation, as this post on Recessionwire makes clear.

She asked me if I wanted to do it, but I didn’t think it was such a good idea. It’s bad enough being unemployed without the whole world watching you cope with unemployment and a new wife at the same time.

Not to mention that it sounds like a really dumb show.