Slick Jeffie is lobbing loads of whoppers again, this time about "his" job creation.

It's another spurious saturation-spraying piece of Jeff Gahan’s naked emperor tall-tale fiction. We’ll need to see the evidence about these “high-paying” jobs. Don’t hold your breath waiting for it.

NEW JOBS: Thanks to our public investments in infrastructure and quality of life, major companies like Sazerac, HMS Global Maritime, and American Health Network have been expanding in New Albany. That means hundreds of new high-paying jobs for residents of our River City. #GahanForMayor #MovingNAForward #NewJobs

As three friends incisively noted:

Not only is there no evidence of high paying jobs, there is certainly no proof that any investment or other action by Supreme Leader is responsible. Correlation does not imply causation. It's yet another example of Gahan’s credit-snatching campaign when 95% of the jobs in New Albany are thanks to the free market and entrepreneurial spirit.

and

Also, define “public investments.”

and

How many jobs have been lost during his reign? You have to net out the opposite direction.

Get paid to eat and drink? Hey, I'm back in the job market, and this position sounds promising.

Except that I draw the line at the festering remains of the Floyd County Democratic Party. That's just too much risk for this pagan.

The Worst Paid Freelance Gig in History Was Being the Village Sin Eater ... Sin eaters risked their souls to soak up the sins of the dead, by Natalie Zarrelli (Atlas Obscura)

When a loved one died in parts of England, Scotland, or Wales in the 18th and 19th centuries, the family would grieve, place bread on the chest of the deceased, and call for a man to sit in front of the body. The family of the deceased watched on as this man, the local professional sin eater, absorbed the sins of the departed’s soul.

The family who hired the sin eater believed that the bread literally soaked up their loved one’s sins; once it was eaten, all the misdeeds were passed on to the hired hand. Once the process was complete, the sin eater’s own soul was heavy with the ill deeds of countless men and women from his village or town.

The sin eater paid a high price to help others drift smoothly into the afterlife: the coin he was given was worth a mere four English pence, the equivalent of a few U.S. dollars today. Usually, the only people who would dare risk their immortal being during such a religious era were the very poor, whose desire for a little bread and drink carried them along.

ON THE AVENUES: When I grow up, I'd like to be alive.

ON THE AVENUES: When I grow up, I'd like to be alive.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

The city of Flint, Michigan is where Ayn Rand’s prophetic ramblings about clueless second-raters gleefully indulging in orgies of destructive looting recently are confirmed, except these have been instigated not by the likes of weak, collectivist Jim Taggart, but by those present-day Republicans fancying themselves as Hank Reardon – or even worse, John Galt.

But enough of literature, seeing as Rand rarely practiced it. Let’s switch to music, because the pride of Flint isn’t the wonderful left-wing documentary filmmaker and polemicist Michael Moore, although I adore his work. It’s Grand Funk Railroad, Homer Simpson’s favorite band.

"You kids don't know Grand Funk? The wild shirtless lyrics of Mark Farner? The bong-rattling bass of Mel Schacher? The competent drumwork of Don Brewer? Oh, man!"

In the early 1970s, when Grand Funk was one of America’s biggest homegrown concert draws, live performances of the song “We’re An American Band” were introduced by a recording of little boys telling us what they wanted to be someday.

One says a fireman, and another a cowboy, then this: “When I grow up, I want to be a rock and roll star.”

Don’t we all – except, of course, when we don’t, at all.

---

Indeed, it seems like a disproportionate number of rock and rollers are dying of late: Lemmy, David Bowie, Glenn Frey and a handful of sidemen, like drummer Dale “Buffin” Griffin of Mott the Hoople, which scored its biggest hit with “All the Young Dudes,” written by Bowie.

Throw in the actor Alan Rickman, and observe that in spite of Natalie Cole and Scott Weiland being younger, most of them were around the age of 70 at death – still youthful by today’s standards of longevity, though not according to the history of human habitation on this planet.

Statistically, in the absence of wars and plague, a newborn these days who passes the immediate infant mortality window has a good chance of making it to the very top end of the life expectancy charts.

However, as the calendar pages flutter to the floor, casualties inevitably mount. As the Internet meme reminds us, “Do not regret growing older, it's a privilege denied to many,” and at least we have the luxury of celebrating long, productive careers from musicians fortunate to have avoided the same fate as Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Ronnie Van Zant, whose premature deaths genuinely were “tragic.”

It's still disconcerting. When it comes to what we now conveniently (and often mistakenly) stereotype as “classic rock,” the clock is ticking, and the time approaching for the actuarial tables to balance: Half the Beatles, half the Who … two founding members of Pink Floyd … and one each from Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple.

During this recent spate of memorials, I’ve been feeling déjà vu all over again. I spent the 1960s listening to big band music from the 1930s and 1940s, so artistic attrition is something I’d begun calculating by the 1970s: Ellington and Basis; Miles and Diz; Satchmo and Django. Been there, done that, and mourned while keeping count. Of course, many aficionados of classical music never met a living composer, most of whom had been dead for centuries by the time their music came to dominate overly conservative public radio playlists.

Yes, baby boomers, I know: It isn’t quite the same thing. Never seeing Beethoven at Goethestock doesn’t match viewing Jimi Hendrix at Monterey Pop, and being able to remember very little about it, including whether you actually attended the show.

Please forgive the seeming flippancy, but permit me to offer this advice: All the “classic rock” stars are dead or about to be, so it’s finally time for you to LISTEN TO NEW MUSIC.

Young people insist on playing electric guitars, keyboards, bass and drums, and they’re defying codger logic by producing pleasing and original variations on comforting, familiar and sometimes loud themes. They’re out there, so give them a chance.

It’s the same as doctors: You want yours to be younger than you, right?

---

Back to Grand Funk.

When I grow up, I want to be … well, what?

Some of my school chums had vocational aspirations. They wanted to be soldiers, sailors and race car drivers. Surely there was a future rock and roll star in the bunch, though most were more practical, probably because careers in medicine, law or engineering already had been chosen for them by their parents.

Forty years later, these matters remain a mystery to me. My father desperately wanted me to be an athlete, and while it never made very much sense to me, playing along with him seemed the least disruptive solution. In retrospect, devoting those many hours to playing a musical instrument would have made me happier, even if music wouldn’t have been a likely career choice from a monetary standpoint. Still, basketball didn’t exactly enrich me, did it?

In cosmic terms, singing in choir taught me far more about teamwork than playing sports, which struck me as fundamentally tainted by the “win at any cost” ethos. In a great many ways, I’ve never come close to recapturing the massed choral vibe, emphasizing teamwork for the greater artistic good. I miss it.

Wanting, being and growing up all suggest a process of self-knowledge. What are we good at doing? What do we prefer doing? What makes us feel productive, and provides some semblance of satisfaction at the end of a day?

Speaking personally, I have three answers.

Writing.

For as long as I can remember, finding the right words to convey concepts and ideas has been a daily compulsion, tantamount to an obsession. I awaken to the urge to write, and until the writing’s finished, there is inner discomfort.

Writers take the long view. Like Glenn Frey’s or David Bowie’s songs, the written word when properly rendered is capable of lasting forever, and retaining importance long after the writer gone – even if you’re Ayn Rand.

Teaching.

My mother was a teacher, and I’ve been around teachers my whole life. I’ve done my share of teaching. It’s just that I never actually became a teacher in the sense of officialdom and accreditation.

As a child, it briefly occurred to me to become a park ranger in the National Park Service, but not if it meant going out into mountains to rescue a stray backpacker. Rather, I wanted to be the fellow in the visitor center giving the interpretive talks and answering questions.

My role as self-appointed educator has provided me with the most joy during my time in the beer business. From the beginning, I’ve held that the best way to help create the rising tide necessary to lift all our “good beer” boats was to teach people about good beer, what it is, and why it matters.

Crusading for the collective.

Conversely, my greatest single source of dissonance as a small business operator has been the seemingly inescapable aspect of carnival barking and chest-thumping, to the exclusion of teaching and genuine content. Although I learned how to perform as a front man and to credibly speak the language of self-aggrandizement, it always was done somewhat grudgingly.

However, I can embrace the evangelical in a collective setting. Serving on the Brewers of Indiana Guild board of directors has been delightful precisely because our work – education, legislative advocacy and tub-thumping -- benefits all the brewers in our state, not just the biggest and richest ones, or those screaming loudest.

Teaching’s not about screaming, anyway, or at least it shouldn’t be. It’s why I’m bullish about the prospects for a viable New Albany Restaurant & Bar Association, and the goal of eventually utilizing both it and the bully pulpit of New Albany Indie Fest to advance the outlook for all independent small businesses in the city.

I’ll do whatever I can to help, and perhaps somewhere along the way, a career option will emerge from it. Then I’ll grow up and "be" something -- or not.

---

Recent columns:

January 14: ON THE AVENUES: Should the Queen fail to rescue us, there's always H. L. Mencken.

January 7: ON THE AVENUES: You know, that time when Roger interviewed himself.

December 31: ON THE AVENUES: My 2015 in books and reading.

December 24: ON THE AVENUES: Fairytale of New Albania (2015 mashup).

December 17: ON THE AVENUES: Gin and tacos, and a maybe a doughnut, but only where feasible.

Selling New Albany by the pound? Hey, I'm a bureaucrat, and "I'm only doing my job!"

Something to think about from Steve Turgoose, and as the 1960s rock group once advised, "we have all been here before."

From 2010: "Weights, measures, short pours, long odds and Little Big Pints."

NABC’s Pizzeria & Public House was twice visited last week by Floyd County’s recently installed local weights and measures inspector. His stated reason for knocking on our door was a complaint he had received to the effect that we were not offering full pours of beer.

Consequently, in order to comply with the letter of the law in a place that seldom enforces any of them, we shall continue pouring draft beer as we always have, while recalibrating the way we’ve spoken about our draft business for 18 complaint-free years, as we learn new ways to describe what we're pouring by speaking in vague shades of linguistic, liquid content.

Not only have I been there, but apparently it's where I reside; at least once a year, like clockwork, taking time away from managing a small business to grapple with soulless, turf-hugging bureaucrats. It's enough to make a guy into a Tea Partier, though so far I've been able to avoid the siren's call.

These ruminations are occasioned by the experience of the Bookseller, who lately has been offering books by the pound. What might a few stray ounces constitute between friends and customers? And is the "letter" of the law really applicable to what is, in reality, a marketing ploy?

Must be payback time. Our cute little gimmick of selling a few of our surplus books "by the pound" motivated a 2-man inspection team to come out and harass me for selling books at 25 cents an ounce. City's worried someone might get cheated out of a quarter. Once I realized it wasn't a prank, I got mad. And, as with every regulator this city has thrown at us, we passed. Ridiculous overreach of jurisdiction. And yes, I said do your job and gtfo.

The Baylor for Mayor meme, October 22: Job losses, water parks and sheer delusion.

From September 27, 2015:

This is New Albany's economic development challenge: "Developing the Cure for Corporate Welfare."

From August 9, 2015:

Reader question: "Is there a plan to attract new employers?"

Shattered 2011 Gahan campaign promises, Part 1: The "good jobs" mayor!

Part 2: Education!
Part 3: Unity!

Yo, Jimmy: Can you hook up an audio feed through those tornado warning sirens so we can have a laugh track playing downtown?

A better question: Can ANYONE offer evidence to substantiate ANY action during the past four years applicable to these long discarded campaign promises?

If so, pass it along. Turns out the water park sucked all of his own air out of the room, didn't it?

These cities will power the U.S. economy, and we'll just be the landfill.

It comes as no surprise that as we prepare to endure nine months of mind-numbing daily discussions about University of Louisville and University of Kentucky football and basketball, neither Louisville nor Lexington rank very high on the list of cities with the most science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) jobs.

I know -- the world needs ditch diggers, too, and but when was the last time you heard anyone connected with New Albany municipal government talk about articles like this, even in casual conversation over wretched light beer?

For four years, we've been told that a water park, subsidized "luxury" apartments and the beautification of .8 of a mile on precisely one major street will combine with several million other "quality of life" dollars (and a few hundred thousand gallons of Kool-Aid) to pull our city out of the doldrums.

Except that none of these actions even acknowledge the real questions, much less answer them.

How do we keep our best and brightest here, and attract others of like skill?

How can a water park ever do this?

To cite just one example, not only has David Duggins had no identifiable economic development policies apart from delivering boilerplate CF1 tax abatement forms to a snoozing council twice monthly, but when Mark Cassidy began regularly questioning the rubber-stamping, quite a few of these forms proved to have been filled out incorrectly.

No one ever bothered to look. Millions of fast food employees have been terminated for less.

No, we're not likely to be Huntsville, Alabama, at least any time soon. At the same time, we need to be inventorying community assets and considering future economic development locales outside the "always done it this way" box, or it's going to be a tough commute, sans paddle, on River Ridge Creek.

The Unlikely Cities That Will Power the U.S. Economy, by Christopher Cannon, Patrick Clark, Jeremy Scott Diamond, and Laurie Meisler (Bloomberg Business)

A decade ago, Richard Myers was the director of the Department of Genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where he enjoyed the fruits of a rich endowment and his pick of faculty members and graduate students. So he left behind some befuddled scientists when, in 2008, he left Palo Alto, Calif., for Huntsville, Ala., to launch an independent research lab, the HudsonAlpha Institute.

“‘My God, you’re leaving Stanford for Alabama?’” Myers recalls colleagues asking. “‘What’s wrong with you?’”

Huntsville may not seem like an obvious place to base a center for genomics, a branch of biology concerned with DNA sequences that requires expensive hardware and even greater investment in human capital. Alabama ranks in the bottom 10 U.S. states for educational attainment and median income.

Yet Huntsville, nestled in a hilly region in the northern part of the state, turns out to be a great place to recruit high-tech workers. As of May 2014, 16.7 percent of workers in the metropolitan area held a job in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics—STEM, for short—making it the third most technical workforce in the country after San Jose, Calif., and Framingham, Mass., a Bloomberg analysis of Labor Department statistics shows.

Huntsville is one of a growing number of smaller U.S. cities, far from Silicon Valley, that are seeking to replace dwindling factory jobs by reinventing themselves as tech centers. Across the Midwest, Northeast, and South, mayors and governors are competing to attract tech companies and workers.

Hand me those knitting needles, because we're all truck drivers now.

See the map change, and read about the most common (not to say "proper") jobs in each state. Thanks to B for the link.

The Most Common* Job In Each State 1978-2014 (NPR)

What's with all the truck drivers? Truck drivers dominate the map for a few reasons.

Driving a truck has been immune to two of the biggest trends affecting U.S. jobs: globalization and automation. A worker in China can't drive a truck in Ohio, and machines can't drive cars (yet).

Regional specialization has declined. So jobs that are needed everywhere — like truck drivers and schoolteachers — have moved up the list of most-common jobs.

The prominence of truck drivers is partly due to the way the government categorizes jobs. It lumps together all truck drivers and delivery people, creating a very large category. Other jobs are split more finely; for example, primary school teachers and secondary school teachers are in separate categories.

"He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist."

More philosophy than hardcore economics, but since hardcore economics possesses its own voluminous imagination, I'd say we can call it even.

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, by David Graeber (Strike! Magazine)

... These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the very sort of problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organising or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.

Congratulations to Cary Stemle.

There doesn't appear to be an official announcement, at least yet, but the social media grapevine reports that former longtime LEO editor Cary Stemle is to be the new managing editor at Louisville's Business First, where Insider Louisville recently was compelled to resort to a reading of tea leaves to make sense of a personnel "exodus."

I'm not a BF devotee, but sincere congratulations to Cary. He's good people.

Our newest NABC hires.

After NABC posted on-line in April for the brewery representative position being vacated by Richard Atnip, we received 45 applications.

It was a "wow" moment for me.

For perhaps the first time in company history, we formed a committee of owners and managers, and began going through the submissions. There were many good ones, and it wasn't easy sifting through so much talent.

This resulted in a final list of 10, two rounds of interviews, and the eventual hiring of Blake Montgomery. Significantly, two others among the applicants have been hired for jobs other than brewery rep: Peter Fingerson in the brewery, and Alliee Bliss as bartender and server at Bank Street Brewhouse.

Blake is from Kansas, his wife hails from right here in New Albany, and they've lived in Kokomo for a long while. It's heartening to know that they're willing to relocate for the job, and all of us at NABC are feeling good about what's coming.

Meet Blake Montgomery and Peter Fingerson

NABC is seeking a full-time brewery representative.

Just the other day, I broke the news that Richard Atnip is moving from one New Prefixed Brewery to another: Richard’s going to work for New Holland, and NABC wishes him the best.

Obviously, we need to recruit a replacement, and so I have posted a job description and information about how to apply.

Readers, if you or any of your friends might be interested in the position, please examine the description and share. Thanks. It is here: NABC is seeking a full-time brewery representative.

Rep. Clere has all of us working!

And that's a wonderful thing, because now the Amazon monolith can hire the very same people it puts out of work. Gotta love American capitalism, eh? Have I been assigned to a multinational yet? That's what is meant by "right", right?

We've seen the Amazon job "pro," so now for the "con."

We've seen the Amazon job "pro," so now for the "con."

Here's what the newspaper told you:

A river of jobs: Lines were long for Amazon job fair with 1,000 positions promised, by Daniel Suddeath (N and T)

NEW ALBANY — It’s said the early bird gets the worm, and in New Albany on Thursday, there were plenty of applicants hungry for one of the 1,000 jobs Amazon.com Inc. has promised to bring to Southern Indiana by 2015.

Here's what the newspaper didn't tell you (heavily excerpted):

I Want It Today: How Amazon’s ambitious new push for same-day delivery will destroy local retail, by Farhad Manjoo (Slate)

In response to pressure from local businesses, many states have passed laws that aim to force Amazon to collect sales taxes (the laws do so by broadening what it means for a company to have a physical presence in the state). Amazon hasn’t taken kindly to these efforts.

But suddenly, Amazon has stopped fighting the sales-tax war.

Why would Amazon give up its precious tax advantage? This week, as part of an excellent investigative series on the firm, the Financial Times’ Barney Jopson reports that Amazon’s tax capitulation is part of a major shift in the company’s operations.

Now Amazon has a new game. Now that it has agreed to collect sales taxes, the company can legally set up warehouses right inside some of the largest metropolitan areas in the nation. Why would it want to do that? Because Amazon’s new goal is to get stuff to you immediately—as soon as a few hours after you hit Buy.

It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly this move will shake up the retail industry. Same-day delivery has long been the holy grail of Internet retailers, something that dozens of startups have tried and failed to accomplish. (Remember Kozmo.com?) But Amazon is investing billions to make next-day delivery standard, and same-day delivery an option for lots of customers. If it can pull that off, the company will permanently alter how we shop. To put it more bluntly: Physical retailers will be hosed.

Amazon is investing $130 million in new facilities in New Jersey that will bring it into the backyard of New York City; another $135 million to build two centers in Virginia that will allow it to service much of the mid-Atlantic; $200 million in Texas; and more than $150 million in Tennessee and $150 million in Indiana to serve the middle of the country.

Clere flier equates "jobs plan for Southern Indiana" with 1Si endorsement.

1SI at the bat: Watch for the hit and run

We at NAC are growing accustomed to silence from CEO Michael Dalby and his 1SI cohorts when it comes to questions seeking clarification about the group's actions, so when public statements are made, it's all the more interesting.

I was intrigued, then, to find the image of a baseball on the 1SI home page last week denoting a 3000 club. It's since been removed but the document to which it linked is provided below.



It seems 1SI is straining its creativity to invoke a baseball metaphor as a means of self-congratulations, announcing that it's responsible for an "epic milestone": "unprecedented job growth" of over 3,000 new jobs.

While it's unexplained and unclear how 1SI is directly responsible for 3,000 new jobs, what is clear is that "unprecedented", according to Oxford American Dictionaries, means never done or known before. Fortunately, or unfortunately if you're getting paid to sell fuzzy math to the public with bad puns involving players banned from their own sport, a review of U.S. Census Bureau job statistics for Clark and Floyd Counties between 1984 and 2004 shows that 3,000 new jobs is akin to a certain Hall of Famer's déjà vu all over again.

According to census information, the two counties, long before the advent of 1SI, topped the 3,000 new jobs mark in 1987 (3,315), 1990 (3,663), 1995 (3,722) and 1998 (4,494). Worth noting is that Census Bureau statistics document growth during periods of 12 months, not 17, as does 1SI's announcement.

1SI's self-reported 12-month figures show 2,190 projected new jobs. I'll assume I don't need to define "projected" for them as well and simply mention that, even if all the projected jobs had already come to fruition, it would mean that 1994 was a better year as well with 2,985 new jobs. Other notable, non-1SI years are 1992 (2,066 new jobs), 1997 (1,914), and 1999 (2,081), all between 87 and 95% of 1SI's projections, which can't actually be counted until they become real jobs. And, even then, they'd be counted in the year of hire, not announcement.

We hope to spend part of the next week or so in consideration of 1SI's business luring practices and what they cost the community. It's important for now, though, to establish that any such discussions need be based on real, documentable numbers rather than promotional numerology, no matter how quaint the presentation. Doing so would be unprecedented.