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> Johnson started using opioids in high school after breaking his collarbone, first in football and again while wrestling [... T]hings slipped out of control af

by zeteo 10y ago

> Johnson started using opioids in high school after breaking his collarbone, first in football and again while wrestling [... T]hings slipped out of control after he graduated and found that his skills — art and cooking, but not academics — meant little in the workforce. > At one point [... he] got a full-time job making wood pallets. [...] “It’s a stupid job. It doesn’t matter if you’re high to work it” It's hard not to think the kid was let down by the system. It should be inconceivable that you can go through K-12 without being told very sternly that a) skills in sports, art and cooking are not very marketable, and will probably only get you "stupid jobs" b) in the current environment, even McD may require a college degree soon, so you'd better bite the bullet on those academic skills. Any adult in a position of responsibility should have known these facts. Yet for 12+ years they've failed to communicate them. The kids are allowed to drift aimlessly, and then it's somehow their fault if they end up in a very bad place at the end.

anigbrowl 10y ago
Skills in sports, arts and cooking are highly marketable and the evidence of this abundant, just switch on your TV. These are also highly competitive injuries in which a great deal of strategy is needed to succeed because the economics are brutal and the media is dedicated to presenting (almost) only the upsides in order to attract an ongoing supply of cheap labor that can be exploited for short-term profit. I resent your suggestion that people engaged in these field are doing 'stupid jobs'. It's insulting to to large numbers of people who work diligently and develop significant skills in those domains whose product you have chosen to declare worthless.
- zeteo 10y ago
  Yes, and winning the lottery is highly marketable too, isn't it? I didn't say working in sports, arts or cooking was a stupid job. The stupid job is what you get if you can't make any money using the skills you've developed.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    Apparently you think that anything other than being at the peak of one's profession is a 'stupid job.' There are large numbers of jobs that depend on people being diligent rather than innovative, and those jobs are certainly easier to automate, but that does not make them stupid jobs. Stop devaluing hard work just because some people choose predictability over risk.
    - zeteo 10y ago
      > Apparently you think that anything other than being at the peak of one's profession is a 'stupid job.' [...] Stop devaluing hard work just because some people choose predictability over risk. The "stupid job" was what the kid himself called his employment making wooden pallets. It wasn't a job in sports or cooking and I nowhere implied that I agreed with his assessment. If he had been hard at work and passionate about a line cook job that didn't pay well, then we'd be having a totally different discussion.
      - anigbrowl 10y ago
        I still reject the idea that someone who is interested and good at cooking should be discouraged from it because they're likely to end up in a 'stupid job,' as you aver. I'd be more cautious about encouraging someone to pursue it now that kitchen automation is on the horizon, but aspiring to be a chef or run a diner or some other food-related employment used to be a perfectly valid career choice. Every job can theoretically be automated away. Yesterday I was thinking about someone I knew who specialized in detecting detecting cancer on biopsy slides (I forget the technical term for her job). Last time I saw that person was 15 years ago and I was musing on the fact that her job as she described it then may well have been taken over by machine learning since, or will be soon if not. Did her teachers and family do her a terrible disservice by not telling her to get into a line of work that would be harder to automate? Probably not. I'm arguing that we need a different approach as a society to choosing jobs based on an assumption of remorselessly increasing technological efficiency and cutthroat competition. This hyper-Darwinian approach to employment, productivity, and economic decision-making is reducing the quality of life for an increasingly large number of people, and at some point they are going to get tired of holding up the pyramid from which more fortunate people self-righteously piss down upon them.
_rpd 10y ago
Agreed. And the same is true of college courses. $120k in debt with a degree in Art History is digging your own financial grave.

by zeteo 10y ago

anigbrowl 10y ago

Skills in sports, arts and cooking are highly marketable and the evidence of this abundant, just switch on your TV. These are also highly competitive injuries in which a great deal of strategy is needed to succeed because the economics are brutal and the media is dedicated to presenting (almost) only the upsides in order to attract an ongoing supply of cheap labor that can be exploited for short-term profit. I resent your suggestion that people engaged in these field are doing 'stupid jobs'. It's insulting to to large numbers of people who work diligently and develop significant skills in those domains whose product you have chosen to declare worthless.

zeteo 10y ago
Yes, and winning the lottery is highly marketable too, isn't it? I didn't say working in sports, arts or cooking was a stupid job. The stupid job is what you get if you can't make any money using the skills you've developed.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  Apparently you think that anything other than being at the peak of one's profession is a 'stupid job.' There are large numbers of jobs that depend on people being diligent rather than innovative, and those jobs are certainly easier to automate, but that does not make them stupid jobs. Stop devaluing hard work just because some people choose predictability over risk.
  - zeteo 10y ago
    > Apparently you think that anything other than being at the peak of one's profession is a 'stupid job.' [...] Stop devaluing hard work just because some people choose predictability over risk. The "stupid job" was what the kid himself called his employment making wooden pallets. It wasn't a job in sports or cooking and I nowhere implied that I agreed with his assessment. If he had been hard at work and passionate about a line cook job that didn't pay well, then we'd be having a totally different discussion.
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      I still reject the idea that someone who is interested and good at cooking should be discouraged from it because they're likely to end up in a 'stupid job,' as you aver. I'd be more cautious about encouraging someone to pursue it now that kitchen automation is on the horizon, but aspiring to be a chef or run a diner or some other food-related employment used to be a perfectly valid career choice. Every job can theoretically be automated away. Yesterday I was thinking about someone I knew who specialized in detecting detecting cancer on biopsy slides (I forget the technical term for her job). Last time I saw that person was 15 years ago and I was musing on the fact that her job as she described it then may well have been taken over by machine learning since, or will be soon if not. Did her teachers and family do her a terrible disservice by not telling her to get into a line of work that would be harder to automate? Probably not. I'm arguing that we need a different approach as a society to choosing jobs based on an assumption of remorselessly increasing technological efficiency and cutthroat competition. This hyper-Darwinian approach to employment, productivity, and economic decision-making is reducing the quality of life for an increasingly large number of people, and at some point they are going to get tired of holding up the pyramid from which more fortunate people self-righteously piss down upon them.

_rpd 10y ago

Agreed. And the same is true of college courses. $120k in debt with a degree in Art History is digging your own financial grave.