Daily Links – 1.6.10

Thoughts on the Job Market
Is all that self-help advice on having a good resume getting you down? Perhaps it is not you. Perhaps it is the system.

How did google get so popular?
“We knew that Google was going to get better every single day as we worked on it, and we knew that sooner or later, everyone was going to try it. So our feeling was that the later you tried it, the better it was for us because we’d make a better impression with better technology. So we were never in a big hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better.”
~Google founder Sergey Brin as told to Seth Godin in The Dip

What’s up for James Dobson after Focus on the Family?
So he’s leaving focus on the family to start James Dobson on the Family. Sounds like someone pulled a Brett Favre.

The Idol of Efficiency
Ashlee makes some good points on the idol of efficiency. Mass discipleship just doesn’t work:

Unfortunately, efficiency is really not the way that Christian maturity works. We can’t do mass discipleship (that’s indoctrination). We can’t do speedy spiritual disciplines (that’s the world’s way). We can’t have reactionary solutions to problems (they’re merely band-aids). Efficiency simply is not the way that God works. Think about it: how efficient is it that God entrusted the task of evangelism, of telling the Good News of Jesus Christ (and him crucified and resurrected) to the flakey disciples. Granted, the disciples (and we) have a H.U.G.E. advocate in the Holy Spirit, but God still uses humanity to introduce Christ to a lost world—this isn’t the most efficient manner of telling others about himself. No…what God could have done if efficiency were top priority is to have preserved multiple written copies of “God’s plan” (sorta like tracts) all over the known world.

Obama’s Response to Captain Underpants
There is lots of talk going on about the underwear bomber, but I liked Marvin’s thoughts over at Advat (I also like Marvin’s question about Al Qaeda):

100 or so guys living in caves simply don’t pose the threat Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany posed to the United States. Just look at the body count. We suffered a 9/11 a day between 1941 and 1945.

Terrorism is a threat, but it is not an existential threat, and will be best dealt with some combination of military force, law enforcement and diplomacy. The last two factors are most important. We cannot invade and occupy every failed state in the world, much less our allies or ourselves where the terrorists also live. The existential threat is the terrorists getting a hold of a nuke, but as we’ve seen in Iraq, military force as a non-proliferation strategy is problematic.

Threadless Tees
Buy good t-shirts with a good design.