4 ms·

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 ge

by 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.

by zeteo 10y ago

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.