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>> A meatgrinder job is a job that pays more not because there are fewer people who can do it, but because there are fewer people that will. They have insanely

>> A meatgrinder job is a job that pays more not because there are fewer people who can do it, but because there are fewer people that will. They have insanely high turnover, because some aspect of the job is so bad that the vast majority of people who try it don’t stay. Maybe it’s long hours that never stop or maybe it’s constant on-call work. Maybe it’s an insane, stress-intensive workload you can’t begin to keep up with. Pediatric oncology. Extremely high skill/pay. Very prestigious. But most will leave within a few years. A working day surrounded by kids undergoing painful treatments, particularly when you are the person prescribing those treatments, grinds down one's soul. Or criminal defense attorneys/prosecutors. Or any law enforcement. To survive such jobs you mush develop a skin so think that to outsiders you appear inhumane.

dazc 5y ago
> Pediatric oncology. ... Or criminal defense attorneys/prosecutors. Not detracting from the point but, in either case, this person is not going to be on the breadline as a consequence of quitting his/her job. They will get a similalrly high paying and high prestige job the next day.
- ryan93 5y ago
  What high paying jobs do doctors get that aren in medicine?
  - rtlfe 5y ago
    There are a lot of jobs in medicine that aren't pediatric oncology.
  - dazc 5y ago
    An oncolgy specialist can get many jobs as a doctor, although not as a specialist as such. Outside of being an actual doctor, many more than a recently unemployed warehouse worker.
- rtlfe 5y ago
  Aren't legal jobs drying up? I've heard a lot about how it's not the golden ticket everybody thought it was 20 years ago.
User23 5y ago
> Pediatric oncology. That job must be nightmarish for anyone who isn’t a full-blown sociopath. I’m not a particularly empathetic person and I couldn’t start that job let alone stay in it for years. Edit: > One of the attractions of pediatrics is, surprisingly enough… This is the opposite of surprising. I imagine one of the appeals of pediatrics is significantly fewer of your patients die. That’s why pediatric oncology is particularly striking, it’s dealing with high numbers of deaths in a cohort where they are otherwise quite rare.
- trillic 5y ago
  There was a young woman in my high school and University class, she was a bit strange. Extremely bright beyond her years, sociable, and got along well with both the teachers and most of the students. There was always something a bit off with her though. From early high-school, as soon as “career” talk got more serious, she had only one job that she claimed she wanted to do, “Pediactric Oncology”. Some of the teachers were also taken aback by her fervor and intensity, but also her consistency. Last I checked she’s in Med school somewhere prestigious, I’m sure she’ll be a great doctor, and that a lot of children will get the attention they deserve, but something worries me about the whole situation.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Oh no, was a person "a bit strange"? Were they "a bit off"? Think of the children!!! It seems especially ugly to see that here on HN. I grew up as the "a bit strange" person in a small midwestern town. It sucked. it wasn't until I got the fuck out and got into tech that I got to be around other nerdy, non-neurotypical people like myself that I finally felt like I could breathe. If you have a complaint about somebody, fine, make it in clear and precise terms. But this scary-scary vagueness looks to me like standard-issue neurotypical bigotry.
    - unsupp0rted 5y ago
      Hear hear! It’s really easy to paint someone as “a bit off” and imply without implying. It’s important when noticing instances of this to request further clarification.
ModernMech 5y ago
> A working day surrounded by kids undergoing painful treatments, particularly when you are the person prescribing those treatments, grinds down one's soul. This is why psychopaths are overrepresented in such professions. I guess it makes it easier to cut into people, and to make dispassionate decisions. edit: are the downvotes because you think I'm implying this is a bad thing? Am I wrong?
- hotpotamus 5y ago
  I was thinking this would be a eusocial use of psychopathy.
- chii 5y ago
  > dispassionate decisions. if they are able to make choices dispassionately that is objectively best for the patient, then it makes them good doctors. The only problem is how does one judge whether they made the decision in the best interest of the patient, when normally, this judgement is based on a proxy metric like sympathy?
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  didn't downvote, but I wonder if you have a study showing the stats. Before I've heard that psychopaths are over-represented in politics, as CEOs, as lawyers, as law enforcement, and as criminals. Now also, evidently, in pediatric oncology?
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    Oh okay I see. When I said "such professions" I meant all of the ones the parent had mentioned: medicine, lawyers, law enforcement. And like you said CEOs and politicians can be added to the list. I know I read something about surgeons in particular having an overrepresentation of psychopaths, but I don't have them handy. I'd imagine it could be true for pediatric oncologists as well for the same reasons, but I don't have any studies to back that up.
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
polotics 5y ago
Just met one and she was the nicest person, just very careful and reserved, used to the toughest decisions. On the upside kids get cured more frequently than adults.
halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
Speaking of criminal prosecutors, I'm binging Law and Order (the OG). I completely understand it's a dramatization of real life but I never understood how complex the process is and how much they actually lose. You'd think the State/People have the upper hand at every turn and most of the time they do, but the amount of process, discovery and overcoming the reasonable doubt burden on their (relatively) limited budgets is a marvel. I know he's fake but I have a ton of respect for the Jack McCoys of the world.
- brokenodometer 5y ago
  Prosecutors do a lot of work, but the idea that they lose a lot is questionable. In the federal system, more than 90% of defendants plead guilty, and only around 1% of defendants take a case to trial and ultimately win. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-federal-criminal-defendants-go-to-trial-and-most-who-do-are-found-guilty/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-f... The numbers in state courts may vary, but in NY they are similar to the federal system. https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/New_York_State_Trial_Penalty_Report_FINAL_03262021.pdf https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/New_... Obviously a guilty plea still requires work, and maybe a lot of it. But in terms of outcomes, they rarely lose.
  - halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
    Yes true, I was more thinking when things went to trial. Pleas make up a large share of outcomes. I was just more surprised at how badly things can go wrong in the process which ends up with a dismissal or acquittal; whether that's police process, evidentiary, testimony, etc.
    - Clubber 5y ago
      The troubling part is the prime tactic is to get people to plea. One of the methods employed is to massively overcharge where the defendant is looking at say 20 years if they lose at trial vs 5 years if they plea. Most people plea, even if they are innocent. Many prosecutors overcharge even when they have a weak case. It's not justice, it's the system protecting its existence.
aqme28 5y ago
Sat down at a bar once and the woman next to me was a pediatric oncologist, basically just crying into her beer about how she wanted to quit. It wasn't just sad-- it was an incredibly interesting conversation that I still remember about a decade later.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  I haven’t spoken to a lot of doctors, but a lot of nurses I know are desperate to leave the field. The last doctor I spoke to was the most condescending man I met in a while, unfortunately, he was also my surgeon.
  - kingkawn 5y ago
    I think it is important to have some empathy for surgeons, despite the commonness of arrogance and the mostly absurdly high compensations they receive. Their work is to intentionally mutilate people and their skill is to make it so that the mutilation will improve health. It is an incredibly dissociating job, taking you out of all standard relationships to the body and other people. It takes years, sometimes decades of training to become skilled enough to lead operations, and even short breaks are known to significantly diminish skill and outcomes for patients. The stress level is unfathomable for lay people, and the distance it creates in them from other people is not a sign that they’re assholes but the remnant of the sacrifices they had to make to fulfill our idea of what they have to be. I know not all surgeons are arrogant in the way you and then I have described, but I always feel sad and caring for those people who are wrecked enough by the process to become so socially inept and disconnected from the people around them.
    - short_sells_poo 5y ago
      I agree with this 100%. The more a matter of life and death a particular field of medicine is, the more I understand people who work there to be "cold" and "uncaring". Not because they are assholes, the exact opposite. I think people in these fields have to sacrifice a great deal of their humanity to be able to do their job and save lives. What we don't see are the undoubtedly countless cases where their pour every last drop of their will to save a person, and it just fails and the patient dies. Through no fault of the doctor. Imagine having to carry that burden. To always question whether the person who was put in your care died because you could've done better. In fact, I think this is an unimaginable burden to carry. I certainly wouldn't be able to do it. I'd break long before that. For this reason alone, these people will always have my very highest regard.
TrackerFF 5y ago
As far as low-skill, high-pay goes, dockworkers unloading ships is up there with meatgrinder jobs. Your team gets paid for each lb / kg unloaded off the ship, and that sum is divided equally over each team member. So the faster and more ships your team can unload, the more you're paid. That's the incentive. I once got paid almost $1000, in just one day - but that day was 20 hours long, and you're pretty much beat to a pulp afterwards. We had people come in, and leave before lunch. No pay in the world would keep them there. Edit, for the curious - I tried to look up some footage of what it looks like: This clip shows a nice and modern trawler, the unloading requires little manpower. See those long brown blocks on the palets? Those would be around 40-50 kgs / 90 - 110 lbs. https://youtu.be/Qi7VNBOJetA?t=115 https://youtu.be/Qi7VNBOJetA?t=115 This is more on par with what you'd usually see - the rooms would be stack to the ceiling with frozen packet/blocks. Those blocks are around 20 kgs / 45 lbs each. https://youtu.be/e7u-X8XR1hs?t=543 https://youtu.be/e7u-X8XR1hs?t=543 Here's a larger trawler - again - sometimes the fish will be stacked to the ceiling https://youtu.be/fQEwECzZL_s?t=2739 https://youtu.be/fQEwECzZL_s?t=2739 Unfortunately I can't seem to find any footage of the more usual scenario, where the blocks are just piled up at random.
- ResNet 5y ago
  > I once got paid almost $1000, in just one day This is surprisingly high in that I would have assumed it would be far more cost-effective for the company to improve automation here and bring in more equipment to assist — intuitively, even if such equipment would be expensive, it couldn't be more expensive than the labor costs. What industry was this?
  - pinko 5y ago
    I think the OP already said: dockworkers unloading ships -- that's the industry. And to the extent that the cargo isn't containerized (sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't), automation is harder than it sounds here: sequencing, unstacking, moving, and re-stacking irregularly-shaped, imbalanced, fragile, and dissimilarly-packaged objects requires lots of experience and judgement or things go awry very fast, and one mistake can cost a ton of time to deal with when something falls over, gets punctured, or gets in the way. This is also true of movers (as in house movers). It's harder than it looks, at least to do well -- many cheaper companies write contracts such that they can screw up and customers have no recourse, which changes the economics a bit -- but the first-rate movers are expensive for a reason. Unless you're incredibly careful (which often implies going more slowly), bodies get wrecked and objects get broken. As an aside, one proxy for a first-rate moving company is them having front-line employees who have been on the job for 5+ years. It's basically impossible for companies that cut corners because no one survives that long. Firms like Gentle Giant out of Boston (I have no stake in the company, I just know them well)) have a stable of long-term employees, many of them athletes, because they're incentivized to do a good job while not hurting themselves. And they're expensive (but not necessarily more expensive than cut-rate firms if you factor in the risk of damage, and/or the likelihood of being fairly reimbursed if something is damaged).
giantg2 5y ago
In the case of LEOs or prosecutors, I think many give up the search for truth and give in to the us-vs-them mentality. The cognitive dissonance and pressure of group dynamics make it almost a certainty. There is huge power in law enforcement and prosecutorial discretion. Yes, some parts of the job have to be strict for safety purposes. There are many other parts that don't. I've had prosecutors and police know that our rights were violated as part of a citation. They did not care. Cop lied multiple times in court and was caught. IAD merely gave them a warning. The LT of the troop made a bunch of BS excuses - either he's actually that stupid or he's lying too. Filed a complaint about an incompetent magistrate whow also violated due process rights - judicial board doesn't care. Prosecutor instructed the court not to talk to us which prevented us from securing remote accommodations for our witness - the Bar didn't care. Civil rights lawyer said our rights were violated, but unless there was substantial monetary damages, the system doesn't care and would likely see it as frivolous. Nobody cares. Nobody protects your rights. If nobody can enforce your rights, do you even have them at all? All the trooper/prosecutor/magistrate/judge had to do, was drop/throw out the case. They had the discretion, and even the responsibility, to do that. Their mentality was the problem. We were guilty in their mind because if we were not, that would make them participants in a broken and unjust system.
- ip26 5y ago
  Defense & prosecution aren't on a search for truth, they are on a search to make the best possible case for & against you, respectively. That's their role in the system. Law enforcement (officers, investigators) I would hope to be on the search for truth.
  - watwut 5y ago
    Purely theoretically, prosecution should search truth. By law, they should follow exculpatory evidence too, give all evidence to defense and few other rules. Not saying they do, in practice they are rewarded for breaking those rules. But, in theory it should be different.
    - giantg2 5y ago
Ozzie_osman 5y ago
> Pediatric oncology My father in law does this, in a developing country no less. Bless his soul, he's a very kind man. But it's incredibly taxing. Not just the treatments but there are many cases where children die and there's nothing you can do about it. And it doesn't stop, even when he's on vacation, he has patient's families calling/texting him. I've been at dinner where someone will walk over and say something like "you saved my brother/daughter/sister/son's life." Or sometimes my wife and I will meet someone who will recognize she's his daughter and day the same. Hopefully that makes it worth it.
dumpsterlid 5y ago
> Or any law enforcement. Please don't equate healthcare workers with law enforcement. Healthcare workers have an astronomically harder job and actually make society a better place.
- mythrwy 5y ago
  I have a friend who used to be a cop in Dallas. He's a dentist now. He says he makes many times the money with much less stress. Being in law enforcement in this climate seems like a pretty rough job to me. And that's not to excuse bad law enforcement behavior (of which there is plenty) either. "Actually make society a better place". << What do you suppose your world would look like with no enforcement of any laws?
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  I think in terms of difficulty, law enforcement has much more skin in the game- both jobs have to deal with potential guilt from screwing up but if a surgeon misjudges a situation pretty much the worst outcome is that they get sued and in egregious cases lose their job. Whereas in law enforcement you're more likely to have adversarial interactions with armed people, drunk drivers, etc where your own life is in danger. Based on my (definitely incomplete so feel free to fill in any blanks I have!) knowledge of places that don't have formal law enforcement, it's impossible to make a good faith argument that they're better places because of it.
  - bluquark 5y ago
    Prior to 2020, health work was probably safer, but since then over eighty thousand health workers have died of Covid worldwide: https://www.who.int/news/item/20-10-2021-health-and-care-worker-deaths-during-covid-19 https://www.who.int/news/item/20-10-2021-health-and-care-wor... If the world is unlucky enough to experience another pandemic someday, health workers will be expected to risk their lives once again during the period where no vaccines or good treatments exist.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    Law enforcement in the United States is a fairly safe job. Adversarial interactions with armed people and drunk drivers are sadly part of many more jobs, and generally the most dangerous behaviour a cop will engage in is driving.

dazc 5y ago

> Pediatric oncology. ... Or criminal defense attorneys/prosecutors. Not detracting from the point but, in either case, this person is not going to be on the breadline as a consequence of quitting his/her job. They will get a similalrly high paying and high prestige job the next day.

ryan93 5y ago
What high paying jobs do doctors get that aren in medicine?
- rtlfe 5y ago
  There are a lot of jobs in medicine that aren't pediatric oncology.
- dazc 5y ago
  An oncolgy specialist can get many jobs as a doctor, although not as a specialist as such. Outside of being an actual doctor, many more than a recently unemployed warehouse worker.
rtlfe 5y ago
Aren't legal jobs drying up? I've heard a lot about how it's not the golden ticket everybody thought it was 20 years ago.

User23 5y ago

> Pediatric oncology. That job must be nightmarish for anyone who isn’t a full-blown sociopath. I’m not a particularly empathetic person and I couldn’t start that job let alone stay in it for years. Edit: > One of the attractions of pediatrics is, surprisingly enough… This is the opposite of surprising. I imagine one of the appeals of pediatrics is significantly fewer of your patients die. That’s why pediatric oncology is particularly striking, it’s dealing with high numbers of deaths in a cohort where they are otherwise quite rare.

trillic 5y ago
There was a young woman in my high school and University class, she was a bit strange. Extremely bright beyond her years, sociable, and got along well with both the teachers and most of the students. There was always something a bit off with her though. From early high-school, as soon as “career” talk got more serious, she had only one job that she claimed she wanted to do, “Pediactric Oncology”. Some of the teachers were also taken aback by her fervor and intensity, but also her consistency. Last I checked she’s in Med school somewhere prestigious, I’m sure she’ll be a great doctor, and that a lot of children will get the attention they deserve, but something worries me about the whole situation.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Oh no, was a person "a bit strange"? Were they "a bit off"? Think of the children!!! It seems especially ugly to see that here on HN. I grew up as the "a bit strange" person in a small midwestern town. It sucked. it wasn't until I got the fuck out and got into tech that I got to be around other nerdy, non-neurotypical people like myself that I finally felt like I could breathe. If you have a complaint about somebody, fine, make it in clear and precise terms. But this scary-scary vagueness looks to me like standard-issue neurotypical bigotry.
  - unsupp0rted 5y ago
    Hear hear! It’s really easy to paint someone as “a bit off” and imply without implying. It’s important when noticing instances of this to request further clarification.

ModernMech 5y ago

> A working day surrounded by kids undergoing painful treatments, particularly when you are the person prescribing those treatments, grinds down one's soul. This is why psychopaths are overrepresented in such professions. I guess it makes it easier to cut into people, and to make dispassionate decisions. edit: are the downvotes because you think I'm implying this is a bad thing? Am I wrong?

hotpotamus 5y ago
I was thinking this would be a eusocial use of psychopathy.
chii 5y ago
> dispassionate decisions. if they are able to make choices dispassionately that is objectively best for the patient, then it makes them good doctors. The only problem is how does one judge whether they made the decision in the best interest of the patient, when normally, this judgement is based on a proxy metric like sympathy?
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
didn't downvote, but I wonder if you have a study showing the stats. Before I've heard that psychopaths are over-represented in politics, as CEOs, as lawyers, as law enforcement, and as criminals. Now also, evidently, in pediatric oncology?
- ModernMech 5y ago
  Oh okay I see. When I said "such professions" I meant all of the ones the parent had mentioned: medicine, lawyers, law enforcement. And like you said CEOs and politicians can be added to the list. I know I read something about surgeons in particular having an overrepresentation of psychopaths, but I don't have them handy. I'd imagine it could be true for pediatric oncologists as well for the same reasons, but I don't have any studies to back that up.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago

polotics 5y ago

Just met one and she was the nicest person, just very careful and reserved, used to the toughest decisions. On the upside kids get cured more frequently than adults.

halfmatthalfcat 5y ago

Speaking of criminal prosecutors, I'm binging Law and Order (the OG). I completely understand it's a dramatization of real life but I never understood how complex the process is and how much they actually lose. You'd think the State/People have the upper hand at every turn and most of the time they do, but the amount of process, discovery and overcoming the reasonable doubt burden on their (relatively) limited budgets is a marvel. I know he's fake but I have a ton of respect for the Jack McCoys of the world.

brokenodometer 5y ago
Prosecutors do a lot of work, but the idea that they lose a lot is questionable. In the federal system, more than 90% of defendants plead guilty, and only around 1% of defendants take a case to trial and ultimately win. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-federal-criminal-defendants-go-to-trial-and-most-who-do-are-found-guilty/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-f... The numbers in state courts may vary, but in NY they are similar to the federal system. https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/New_York_State_Trial_Penalty_Report_FINAL_03262021.pdf https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/New_... Obviously a guilty plea still requires work, and maybe a lot of it. But in terms of outcomes, they rarely lose.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
  Yes true, I was more thinking when things went to trial. Pleas make up a large share of outcomes. I was just more surprised at how badly things can go wrong in the process which ends up with a dismissal or acquittal; whether that's police process, evidentiary, testimony, etc.
  - Clubber 5y ago
    The troubling part is the prime tactic is to get people to plea. One of the methods employed is to massively overcharge where the defendant is looking at say 20 years if they lose at trial vs 5 years if they plea. Most people plea, even if they are innocent. Many prosecutors overcharge even when they have a weak case. It's not justice, it's the system protecting its existence.

aqme28 5y ago

Sat down at a bar once and the woman next to me was a pediatric oncologist, basically just crying into her beer about how she wanted to quit. It wasn't just sad-- it was an incredibly interesting conversation that I still remember about a decade later.

the_only_law 5y ago
I haven’t spoken to a lot of doctors, but a lot of nurses I know are desperate to leave the field. The last doctor I spoke to was the most condescending man I met in a while, unfortunately, he was also my surgeon.
- kingkawn 5y ago
  I think it is important to have some empathy for surgeons, despite the commonness of arrogance and the mostly absurdly high compensations they receive. Their work is to intentionally mutilate people and their skill is to make it so that the mutilation will improve health. It is an incredibly dissociating job, taking you out of all standard relationships to the body and other people. It takes years, sometimes decades of training to become skilled enough to lead operations, and even short breaks are known to significantly diminish skill and outcomes for patients. The stress level is unfathomable for lay people, and the distance it creates in them from other people is not a sign that they’re assholes but the remnant of the sacrifices they had to make to fulfill our idea of what they have to be. I know not all surgeons are arrogant in the way you and then I have described, but I always feel sad and caring for those people who are wrecked enough by the process to become so socially inept and disconnected from the people around them.
  - short_sells_poo 5y ago
    I agree with this 100%. The more a matter of life and death a particular field of medicine is, the more I understand people who work there to be "cold" and "uncaring". Not because they are assholes, the exact opposite. I think people in these fields have to sacrifice a great deal of their humanity to be able to do their job and save lives. What we don't see are the undoubtedly countless cases where their pour every last drop of their will to save a person, and it just fails and the patient dies. Through no fault of the doctor. Imagine having to carry that burden. To always question whether the person who was put in your care died because you could've done better. In fact, I think this is an unimaginable burden to carry. I certainly wouldn't be able to do it. I'd break long before that. For this reason alone, these people will always have my very highest regard.

TrackerFF 5y ago

As far as low-skill, high-pay goes, dockworkers unloading ships is up there with meatgrinder jobs. Your team gets paid for each lb / kg unloaded off the ship, and that sum is divided equally over each team member. So the faster and more ships your team can unload, the more you're paid. That's the incentive. I once got paid almost $1000, in just one day - but that day was 20 hours long, and you're pretty much beat to a pulp afterwards. We had people come in, and leave before lunch. No pay in the world would keep them there. Edit, for the curious - I tried to look up some footage of what it looks like: This clip shows a nice and modern trawler, the unloading requires little manpower. See those long brown blocks on the palets? Those would be around 40-50 kgs / 90 - 110 lbs. https://youtu.be/Qi7VNBOJetA?t=115 https://youtu.be/Qi7VNBOJetA?t=115 This is more on par with what you'd usually see - the rooms would be stack to the ceiling with frozen packet/blocks. Those blocks are around 20 kgs / 45 lbs each. https://youtu.be/e7u-X8XR1hs?t=543 https://youtu.be/e7u-X8XR1hs?t=543 Here's a larger trawler - again - sometimes the fish will be stacked to the ceiling https://youtu.be/fQEwECzZL_s?t=2739 https://youtu.be/fQEwECzZL_s?t=2739 Unfortunately I can't seem to find any footage of the more usual scenario, where the blocks are just piled up at random.

ResNet 5y ago
> I once got paid almost $1000, in just one day This is surprisingly high in that I would have assumed it would be far more cost-effective for the company to improve automation here and bring in more equipment to assist — intuitively, even if such equipment would be expensive, it couldn't be more expensive than the labor costs. What industry was this?
- pinko 5y ago
  I think the OP already said: dockworkers unloading ships -- that's the industry. And to the extent that the cargo isn't containerized (sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't), automation is harder than it sounds here: sequencing, unstacking, moving, and re-stacking irregularly-shaped, imbalanced, fragile, and dissimilarly-packaged objects requires lots of experience and judgement or things go awry very fast, and one mistake can cost a ton of time to deal with when something falls over, gets punctured, or gets in the way. This is also true of movers (as in house movers). It's harder than it looks, at least to do well -- many cheaper companies write contracts such that they can screw up and customers have no recourse, which changes the economics a bit -- but the first-rate movers are expensive for a reason. Unless you're incredibly careful (which often implies going more slowly), bodies get wrecked and objects get broken. As an aside, one proxy for a first-rate moving company is them having front-line employees who have been on the job for 5+ years. It's basically impossible for companies that cut corners because no one survives that long. Firms like Gentle Giant out of Boston (I have no stake in the company, I just know them well)) have a stable of long-term employees, many of them athletes, because they're incentivized to do a good job while not hurting themselves. And they're expensive (but not necessarily more expensive than cut-rate firms if you factor in the risk of damage, and/or the likelihood of being fairly reimbursed if something is damaged).

giantg2 5y ago

In the case of LEOs or prosecutors, I think many give up the search for truth and give in to the us-vs-them mentality. The cognitive dissonance and pressure of group dynamics make it almost a certainty. There is huge power in law enforcement and prosecutorial discretion. Yes, some parts of the job have to be strict for safety purposes. There are many other parts that don't. I've had prosecutors and police know that our rights were violated as part of a citation. They did not care. Cop lied multiple times in court and was caught. IAD merely gave them a warning. The LT of the troop made a bunch of BS excuses - either he's actually that stupid or he's lying too. Filed a complaint about an incompetent magistrate whow also violated due process rights - judicial board doesn't care. Prosecutor instructed the court not to talk to us which prevented us from securing remote accommodations for our witness - the Bar didn't care. Civil rights lawyer said our rights were violated, but unless there was substantial monetary damages, the system doesn't care and would likely see it as frivolous. Nobody cares. Nobody protects your rights. If nobody can enforce your rights, do you even have them at all? All the trooper/prosecutor/magistrate/judge had to do, was drop/throw out the case. They had the discretion, and even the responsibility, to do that. Their mentality was the problem. We were guilty in their mind because if we were not, that would make them participants in a broken and unjust system.

ip26 5y ago
Defense & prosecution aren't on a search for truth, they are on a search to make the best possible case for & against you, respectively. That's their role in the system. Law enforcement (officers, investigators) I would hope to be on the search for truth.
- watwut 5y ago
  Purely theoretically, prosecution should search truth. By law, they should follow exculpatory evidence too, give all evidence to defense and few other rules. Not saying they do, in practice they are rewarded for breaking those rules. But, in theory it should be different.
  - giantg2 5y ago

Ozzie_osman 5y ago

> Pediatric oncology My father in law does this, in a developing country no less. Bless his soul, he's a very kind man. But it's incredibly taxing. Not just the treatments but there are many cases where children die and there's nothing you can do about it. And it doesn't stop, even when he's on vacation, he has patient's families calling/texting him. I've been at dinner where someone will walk over and say something like "you saved my brother/daughter/sister/son's life." Or sometimes my wife and I will meet someone who will recognize she's his daughter and day the same. Hopefully that makes it worth it.

dumpsterlid 5y ago

> Or any law enforcement. Please don't equate healthcare workers with law enforcement. Healthcare workers have an astronomically harder job and actually make society a better place.

mythrwy 5y ago
I have a friend who used to be a cop in Dallas. He's a dentist now. He says he makes many times the money with much less stress. Being in law enforcement in this climate seems like a pretty rough job to me. And that's not to excuse bad law enforcement behavior (of which there is plenty) either. "Actually make society a better place". << What do you suppose your world would look like with no enforcement of any laws?
Rebelgecko 5y ago
I think in terms of difficulty, law enforcement has much more skin in the game- both jobs have to deal with potential guilt from screwing up but if a surgeon misjudges a situation pretty much the worst outcome is that they get sued and in egregious cases lose their job. Whereas in law enforcement you're more likely to have adversarial interactions with armed people, drunk drivers, etc where your own life is in danger. Based on my (definitely incomplete so feel free to fill in any blanks I have!) knowledge of places that don't have formal law enforcement, it's impossible to make a good faith argument that they're better places because of it.
- bluquark 5y ago
  Prior to 2020, health work was probably safer, but since then over eighty thousand health workers have died of Covid worldwide: https://www.who.int/news/item/20-10-2021-health-and-care-worker-deaths-during-covid-19 https://www.who.int/news/item/20-10-2021-health-and-care-wor... If the world is unlucky enough to experience another pandemic someday, health workers will be expected to risk their lives once again during the period where no vaccines or good treatments exist.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  Law enforcement in the United States is a fairly safe job. Adversarial interactions with armed people and drunk drivers are sadly part of many more jobs, and generally the most dangerous behaviour a cop will engage in is driving.