All hail mikesteane, brave Reddit warrior and champion of the rights of men!
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The Burny Mike Show
We Hunted The MammothBucking the Backlash
We Hunted The MammothAll hail mikesteane, brave Reddit warrior and champion of the rights of men!
What the fuck is a doctor going to do without support staff again?
It’s just supply and demand – we don’t have enough people who can be doctors, but we have plenty of people who can be janitors. That doesn’t mean we don’t need janitors.
I’ve worked minimum wage jobs and I’ve worked ones which require some education. That doesn’t mean what I previously did was useless and certainly not easier – I have a lot of respect for the people who bring me my food – but it’s just stupid to say that I was more productive waiter than a software engineer.
Can we agree that one job which requires a college education will probably contribute more to society than, say, a McDonalds worker? Because I agree with you, there is a certain stigma associated with hard, manual work with a lot of people thinking they’re “too good” for it. Oftentimes that work takes more effort than the more technical stuff, and it certainly isn’t always as fulfilling. That does not mean manual labor is bad, but this whole pseudo-Marxist thing about how earning more is a evil is just fallacious.
>>Can we agree that one job which requires a college education will probably contribute more to society than, say, a McDonalds worker?
With the state of the economy these days, that McDonald’s worker probably HAS a college education…
Ya know, when I was growing up, garbo was the ‘ideal’ man’s job, honourable and respectable. It was looked down on to be ‘middle class’. Times change, ay.
So a garbo is a person who collects the garbage? Sorry, don’t really speak Aussie.
If that’s the case though I think it’s less a times change thing and more a different societies thing. America is really weird about class.
@CassandraSays: America is weird about class because of its national mythology of being a classless society. The only time people talk class is when people say that other people are fomenting class warfare against the rich…
Yep, sorry. Garbo is a garbage collector. it used to be a popular job with footballers, to keep fit. The job doesn’t exist anymore because we now have wheelie bins and the truck picks them up with a big claw.
Also, Milko is a milkman. But a postman is Postie. I don’t know why.
Yeah, moving here as a Scot who grew up steeped in British class politics was really weird. Especially since I quickly got a job in which I was working with good old fashioned East Coast blue-bloods. Think they’d have hired me if I hadn’t gone to boarding school? I was the only person at that company who didn’t graduate from an Ivy League university (because I went to Uni in the UK).
Classless society my ass.
Postmen are Posties in the UK too, but the milkman was just a milkman, when we still had them.
When I see garbage trucks here they still have people on them. Less people than they use to because of the newer equipment, I guess? But there are definitely people who pull the bins out to the truck and then roll them back again.
Never having been to the USA, I get my impressions of the country from movies – in the movies a person’s worth seems to be based on how much money they have, and nothing else. Is that a real thing?
The trucks in our town only have a driver, who has to get out if the bins get stuck or anything.
They still had men run behind and pick up bins, empty them into the truck, and put them back (and put the lid back on!) when I was a young adult. Those blokes were very, very fit!
“Never having been to the USA, I get my impressions of the country from movies – in the movies a person’s worth seems to be based on how much money they have, and nothing else. Is that a real thing?”
Hmm, this is where it gets complicated. You can definitely acquire a certain level of social power here by getting rich, but there’s still an established upper class that look down on new money and have their own social codes, mannerisms, etc. The way it’s different to say the UK is that most Americans don’t seem to be able to instantly spot upper class members of their own society in the way that everyone British can. It’s almost like the upper class here is partially hidden from everyone except themselves and the few people who interact with them directly. It’s really very odd.
I think in the US new money tends to have a better reputation than old money, actually, because our mythos includes “job creators” and “real Americans” (middle or working class). So the “ideal” American would probably have grown up working class (but not one of those really poor societal leeches), started a business, and gotten filthy rich from it.
Except among the actual blue-bloods, who’re every bit as snooty and exclusive as their equivalents anywhere else in my experience. That’s the odd disconnect – it’s like they’re totally separate from the rest of American society and have a totally different culture.
What an idiotic question. Did you follow this conversation at all?
Do you enjoy not understanding what people say, and is that why you do it so frequently?
FF: Can we agree that one job which requires a college education will probably contribute more to society than, say, a McDonalds worker?
Nope. I won’t so stipulate, because you are using a wildly divergent set of standards, and then trying to weasel when you say, Because I agree with you, there is a certain stigma associated with hard, manual work, after you did exactly that, by saying people who make more money, ipso facto are more productive members of society.
This is your idea of a decent response to some very specific critiques of your (lousy) argument, “can’t we all agree that people who go to college contribute more?
It’s both a topic change (since you were arguing income, not education) and wrong.
For anyone who wants a good examination of the way class works in the US, I commend, “Class” by Paul Fussell. It a bit dated (he wrote it in the ’80s) but much of it is still spot on.
The US is actually more class conscious than the UK, because, as Cassandra says, it’s not as visible, and the upper classes don’t want people who, “don’t belong” to sneak in.