As long as people fall for scams, and the scammers make money, there will be work at home scams. A couple of months ago we posted a warning about onlinejobstoday.org because it looked like a rip-off, and walked like a rip-off, and quacked like a rip-off. . . .

But yesterday Cindy (the sister of the guy who runs the site, apparently) posted this comment here and lied about who she was:

I had ran into that site, onlinejobstoday.org, and I did order the database, and I did receive many, many legit online job openings from their database. It was well worth the 20.99 to me, it saved me a lot of time because I have been searching for these kind of jobs for a long time.

That’s a lie too, of course—and illiterate, but that’s kinda what I would expeect from someone dumb enough to be this dishonest.

You can save your money and reviewed the same jobs for free. We’ll show you how, and look at their website in more detail so you can tell why we think it’s a rip off.

They say they offer legitimate jobs. They do. But the jobs they want to sell you are compiled by someone else, and provided elsewhere for free. Go to jobster.com or simplyhired.com or indeed.com or carrerbuilders.com and you  can see their job ads—free. You can even create a website just like they have, and display the same jobs, at no charge to you. How do we know? We do it ourselves. Look at the ‘Job Search’ tab at top of this page. Are they legitimate jobs? Yes. But did you have to pay to see them? No.

They claim to have, “…built business relationships with many Large Corporations, Top Employers, and busy Webmasters.“ Really? Just because they use a job board that contains job openings posted by the companies they list DOES NOT mean they have any relationship with those companies.If I do a Google search on Fortune 500, does that mean I have a relationship with any of the company’s the search produces. Of course not.

They claim, “We have built a solid reputation as one of the most trusted provider of legitimate online jobs.” Really? Then how come there are so many web sites and forums posts that describe them as a scam or rip-off?

They claim they are a non-profit. Really? How come they wouldn’t send me their 501(c) registration number so I can claim the ‘donation’ they require as a charitable contribution tax deduction? One site says the IRS is after them, and that sure wouldn’t surprise me.

They claim the $20.99 is a ’contribution’ to cover website hosting costs. Really? What costs do they have when they use Microsoft Office Live, a free web hosting service?

They claim, “You will easily generate income by working from home on your own computer, finally. You should have no problem getting a job today.  Get ready to work from home immediately!“ Really? Are you qualified, experienced, educated? If not, do you think an employer will be pay you just because you want to work from home?

Working from home IS NOT something you do if you can’t find ‘real’ work. Working from home is a new way to work, but it’s real jobs and they take real talent, determination, and hard work. That’s what employers are willing to pay for, after all. If someone claims they’ll pay you big money to stuff envelopes, build toys, or collect refunds ask yourself how a company could make money doing it.

If all that isn’t enough, what do you think of someone who posts bogus jobs on free websites and then claims that onlinejobstoday.org is their ‘outplacement agency‘? I think they’re liars and stupid. Outplacement agencies find people jobs, trhey don’t offer jobs. Outplacement agencies are used by companies when they fire someone (generally executives), as part of an severance package. ‘Outplacement’ sounds important—and it is—but it has nothing to do with finding work at home job openings.

Finally these scum claim they’re a members of BBBonline, and display the logo. They aren’t. You can see for yourself at bbb.org. The also display Verisign and PayPal logos. Big deal. They probably do use those companies to rip people off, but—as you can see—a dishonest webmaster can slap any logo on a site.

Sadly, these folks aren’t doing anything unlawful, except for claiming non-profit status. They deliver what they promise (more or less). The problem is you can get the same thing for free, without all the misleading hype. That’s immoral and dishonest, but they obviously don’t care about such things.

If you’re looking for work at home jobs, telecommuting opportunities, or freelance work PLEASE come here and ask us if we think it’s legitimate before you waste your money. We’ll check up on ‘em, pronto, and tell you what we find.

It’s free too, just to be clear.

David Byrne was the song writer and Brian Eno produced most of the radical albums by Talking Heads, including the 1981 album, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Twenty-seven years later they’re colloborating again of a new album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

It took them a year to do it, and for most of that time the partners were separated by an ocean. Eno provided the music from London and Byrne added melodies, words and vocals from New York City.

Jon Pareles writing for the New York Times quotes Eno: “We didn’t really talk to each other. We used e-mail, (and) the modern way of recording. I could spend as long as I wanted on the music. And he wasn’t under any pressure to do something with me sitting there drumming my fingers.”

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today was released August 18 at everythingthathappens.com.

The President and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki spoke today by secure video while Bush worked from home on his ranch in Texas (image below is White House).

Seems like a good choice when one estimate we found suggests it cost $68,000 an hour to operate each of the two special Presidential Boeing 747s a.k.a USAF VC-25. The National Geographic says the aircraft—called Air Force One when the President is aboard—cost $180 Million a year to operate and maintain.

If those numbers are accurate, a round trip to Baghdad from Andrews AFB in Washington costs something like $1.5 Million, not counting all the costs associated with advance planning, transportation of Secret Service personnel and equipment, etc. etc.

Seems to us that a teleconference makes a lot of cents. As the cost of travel continues to climb you’ll see more and more of this kind of telework thanks to improved video confencing and secure telecommunications.

As telecommuting and work at home jobs become more and more popular, the same enabling technology (computers and broadband telecommunications) makes taking education and training courses from home possible too.

Studies show that e-learning in a corporate setting produces a sixty percent faster learning curve than traditional instruction. IBM’s Basic Blue e-learning initiative is reputed to have produced a 2000x return on investment. Union Pacific Railroad was able to implement new processes twelve months quicker than with traditional training.

The Florida Virtual School, founded in 1997, was the first state-led program to be funded with per-pupil public education funding. More than sixty-eight thousand students were enrolled in the 2008 academic year, taught by 440 full-time teachers and 110 adjuncts.  Students determine what month of the year they want to start, what time of day and where they want to study. They can even choose how they respond to assignments—a PowerPoint presentation, a podcast, a traditional essay, or by creating a Web site. Two-thirds of American graduate schools now offer fully online programs

Almost eighty percent of corporate managers rated online university learning as good as traditional programs, up from less than fifty percent a decade earlier. But how good the courses are is not consistent across the board.

In a prior incarnation we ran a flying service. One of our flyers was a Marine F/A-18 fighter pilot who loved flying vintage airplanes too, but he left our area to go to Navy Test Pilot School (TPS). During two tours over Iraq flying from aircraft carriers he took online courses from the University of Alabama, and received a Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering. He recently took a course from TUI University and earned an MBA too.

He was kind enough to share some thoughts with us about distance learning:

“For someone trying to decide what distance school program to choose (especially graduate degrees), my strongest recommendation would be to make sure to understand specifically what the desired result of the degree is before shopping for a school or curriculum.  I’m sure that seems obvious, but I suspect many people pick a graduate curriculum without thinking it completely through. If your goals don’t require an MBA from Stanford, then why pay the money and go through the pain required to get that diploma?

My MSAE was really painful (took 7 years), and there’s no way I would have finished it if I didn’t want to do it for TPS.  It was academically robust [Ed—that’s test pilot talk for very difficult], and I consider it a pretty decent accomplishment.  If I’m ever hiring people with technical graduate degrees, I’ll treat distance engineering masters as such.

Conversely, the MBA was more of a “target of opportunity”, because I had to take a couple of graduate business courses for my career path anyway, and that combined with transfer credits from Command and Staff College had me nearly halfway there.

I now consider that whole thing nearly a waste of time.  All nine courses were essentially the same thing: write papers on an opinion you have, and support your opinion with information pulled from the reference material.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t we learn to do that in 9th grade english?  Fortunately for me, all I wanted was my military record to show that I have both a technical masters and a business degree.  It now shows that, but I really didn’t learn much of anything from the MBA. Different from the distance engineering masters, I would be wary of anyone pitching their superior management skills based on an online MBA.

I think if I were recommending how to research MBAs (or really any graduate degree) for people who work from home, I would try to find a curriculum that gives you a skill set that fits your needs very specifically.  For example, Johns Hopkins offers a Systems Engineering Masters that centers around military and even specifically Naval service systems acquisition.  It may not necessarily help out any more than other Masters degrees on paper for things like promotion (because the people doing the promoting may not know the specifics of that curriculum), but it should actually help you do your job better.

If you can’t find a curriculum specific to your line of work, which may more often be the case for most people who “undress for success”, it would probably be useful to choose a curriculum familiar to whomever you’re trying to impress.  For example, the University of Dallas has an MBA program that has a good reputation at Lockheed, so that might carry more weight than an MBA from some other small school regardless of whether it is actually more robust.  People who work from home might choose a well known school so the greatest number of potential clients recognize the degree as credible.