SiliconBeat

Lost your job?
We should talk.
The Mercury News is looking for people recently laid off in Silicon Valley. We’ll select three of you to follow in your job search over the coming months, chronicling the same dramatic saga that’s spinning off thousands of new job-seekers every month.
In the pages of the newspaper, and across an online landscape of nteractive and social-networking tools at mercurynews.com, your stories will become part of a much larger
narrative. As readers share in your own hopes and fears, false starts and lucky breaks, you’ll become the emotional hub of a sprawling virtual community. Over time, your stories will tie together folks looking for work and people looking to hire, career experts and seasoned
veterans of past slow-downs, family and friends and even those currently employed but bracing for a pink slip.
In fact, in the spirit of networking, we’re calling the project Pink Slip 2.0.
Just as the dreary unemployment picture it mirrors, we expect this collective tale to gather steam in the coming months. Beyond the continuing series of cliffhangers featuring our
three main job-seekers, the project will become a burgeoning one-stop shop for all things jobless - coping techniques and emotional red flags, how-to tips on navigating the unemployment bureaucracy, health care and tax relief, job retraining and tricks for connecting
with others out there re-inventing themselves.
And with online user forums and live chats from career consultants, the goal is more than simply narrating your personal stories. It’s pulling together the thousands of strands of a local community let loose in this global economic maelstrom.
To help make the project as practical, transparent and technologically savvy as possible, we’ll also create social-networking components like Facebook and Twitter, as well as blogs and
multimedia presentations, to help us all tell the story together.
If you do find a job, we’ll look for a replacement, but still occasionally check in with you.
To volunteer, make sure you’re comfortable publicly sharing the financial and emotional aspects of your own joblessness. Then send me an email at pmay@mercurynews.com.
We’ll email you a brief questionnaire, then narrow down the list to a dozen people we’ll bring in for final interviews. From those, we’ll select three people to follow.
Thanks!

The California Budget Project launched its own blog last week and one of its first items had to do with a report from the National Bureau of Economic Research (”the folks who get to decide what is and is not a recession”) that questioned the valued of Enterprise Zones in creating jobs.

Evidence culled from California’s own Enterprise Zone Program by researchers at the Public Policy Institute conlused that “California’s enterprise zone program doesn’t increase employment and actually leads to a reduction in the number of businesses located within zones.”

The CBP points out that it “came to a similar conclusion in our 2006 report California’s Enterprise Zones Miss the Mark, and last year, the Legislative Analyst’s Office recommended phasing out enterprise zone incentives.”

Most of downtown San Jose lies in such a zone.

“With California facing a $40 billion plus budget shortfall, one might reasonably ask why neither the Governor’s proposed budget nor the Democratic leadership of the legislature’s alternatives for balancing the budget take on a program that cost the state $361 million in 2007 (the most recent year for which data are available) and that is not only ineffective, but appears to have the unintended consequence of reducing the number of businesses actually located within zones.

Addressing California’s massive budget shortfall will take tough choices. Eliminating ineffective tax breaks is a good place to start.”