“Twelve most overrated jobs” includes “physician” and “surgeon.”
It works under the assumption that all doctors in the US got into the career because they wanted to make lots of money. And there’s … like … too much stress and responsibility and “regulation” and not enough lucre to make it worthwhile anymore.
If you are someone with a sense of human decency you won’t object to imagining the people who turned in this poisonous dreck suffering a public horsewhipping.
“CareerCast.com cites ‘increased regulations, lower compensation, and the required need to stay abreast of medical developments’ as factors that make the job overrated,” it reads.
Yeah, all good reasons why being a doctor isn’t quite worth it. Fuck the sick. Go into finance and government capture through massive bribery. We need more of that.
Then there’s the last most “overrated” job. It’s the corporate douchebag, the American trademark, the guy organizing and administering the efforts to make everything into fee-based ripoffs, automated pickpocketing, human drone misery and outsourcing trips over the last fifteen years:
A senior corporate executive would seem to have it all. He or she is responsible for the operations, people, and policies of private and publicly traded companies. It’s hard to imagine more complex or prestigious responsibilities than those, and the average salary of $161,141.
Despite the positive attributes of the job, it earns the top spot on CareerCast.com’s list of Most Overrated Jobs. The firm cites “high stress, shaky stability, and long hours that affect family time” as factors that come with the territory, and make the position much less rewarding than it may seem.
From the wails you here from corporate America and Wall Street on the misguided anger of OWS, it must be true. And certainly if you were one of the PSU corporate executives fired for overlooking the depraved Jerry Sandusky for the last twenty years, you’ll agree, too. Finally, you’ll get to spend more time with your family.
Into the intersection of these trends comes a fascinating, one-of-a-kind new instrument called the You Rock guitar ($200) from Inspired Instruments.
Its solid plastic body is small and not as heavy as wood, but much more substantial than the hollow plastic that most Guitar Hero heroes are used to.
You play real steel strings with your right hand. But they’re only six inches long; they don’t continue up the neck. Instead, your left fingers, on the neck, press what turn out to be only touch sensors.
Since the You Rock can get its power from four AA batteries, it’s an incredibly portable and private practice instrument. You can play when you’re in a rowboat, up in a tree, next to a sleeping partner — all places where ordinary electric guitars would fear to tread.
And you’re not just carrying around one guitar; you’re carrying 100. The You Rock is a full-blown synthesizer. It can sound like a gentle nylon-string acoustic, a rich 12-string folk guitar, a screaming heavy-metal ax — even an organ or a string section.
Electric guitars went portable on AA batteries a long time ago. I’ve attached a pic of a Korg Pandora — mine — a processor that runs on two AA batteries, one that pumps earbud and can make your electric sound like Keith Emerson with ELP at the Isle of Wight, or “a rich 12 string folk guitar. You get the idea. It’s around five years old.
Third, there’s You Rock mode. The guitar’s control panel (colorful square buttons on the top edge) contains 25 song loops — a professional backup band laying down grooves for you. It’s great fun, and great practice, to play along. There’s also an audio input so that you can play along with music from your iPod or another source.
Been done. Everyone has a pocket amp you can plug you iCrap into nowadays.
For example, the You Rock can connect to GarageBand for the iPad. Can you imagine? An entire multitrack recording studio now fits into a backpack.
Lots of multi-track recording studio kit already fits into a backpack.That doesn’t mean you’ll be able to do anything listenable with it. Often, quite the contrary. And there is something to be said for a real studio.
Now, I’m a musician, but not a guitarist.
One of my old Korg Pandoras. A rock band/rehearsal tool in a box.
A newer model, made to also be a sound card for any computer. One version of the Pandora was a 4-track studio that recorded to a small removable data chip.
The Pandoras come with bunches of preset tone applications, for making you sound like an arena-rocker.
It’s three years old. Be a nuisance and send this link to Mr. Pogue.
It’s worth noting there’s a certain physical pleasure that comes from playing an acoustic or electric guitar. It’s a nerves in the fingers, hands, touchy-feely, sensory satisfaction kind of thing. The device reviewed in the New York Times apparently goes to some length to defeat that.
It’s also worth mentioning that having your stuff profiled in the New York Times by some heevahava is better than being given a gold brick.
Nice job, get crap for free because of where you work and then make the company that gave it to ya really happy.
Captured on video, a young war vet hit with a tear gas round or flash bang grenade, and sent to the emergency room with a brain injury.
It’s worth saying none of the one percent have been punished like this fellow who was simply being part of an essentially peaceful national protest against inequality and mass unemployment. Not one of them has been dragged through the street or treated harshly and attacked by the peace-keeping forces.
It is unsurprising this has happened. The entire history of squashing dissent in the last ten years for the sake of plutocracy more or less guaranteed an inevitable overreaction by police somewhere.
The question once the protests started and refused to voluntarily move for anti-mess ordnances used against the poor was where it would happen first.
The primary threats to US security are all internal.
This is a a topic you have never seen taken up by the national threat apparatus and its culture of lickspittle shoeshine men in the think tanks. They’ll never touch it unless it’s to come down on the side of the “rule of law,” neatness and imagined potentials for cultivation of “homegrown” terror.
The internal security threats — corporate America’s business interests being incongruent with genuine democracy, justice and stability — have been significant. It’s just that it has taken massive economic failure and someone being wounded by a tear gas round for everyone to get the unpleasant message.
One challenge facing OWS is the anti-democratic use of cleanliness ordnances to break up groups and encampments.
This AP story delivers the basics: employing a handful of stories about the smell of urine, common in cities, and other petty things involving alleged attraction of rats and being unable to guarantee safety, to destroy a democracy movement spanning the country.
The first graph:
Fed up with petty crime, the all-night racket of beating drums, the smell of human waste and the sight of trampled flowers and grass, police and neighbors are losing patience with some of the anti-Wall Street protests around the U.S.
In Oakland, Calif., police in riot gear fired tear gas and bean bags before daybreak Tuesday to disperse about 170 protesters who had been camping in front of City Hall for the past two weeks, and 75 people were arrested.
The mayor of Providence, R.I., is threatening to go to court within days to evict demonstrators from a park.
And businesses and residents near New York’s Zuccotti Park, the unofficial headquarters of the movement that began in mid-September, are demanding something be done to discourage the hundreds of protesters from urinating in the street and making noise at all hours.
Noise.
‘[The grass is getting damaged, and they want to close the restrooms and begin preparing the park for winter,” reads one concern in Providence.
If damaged grass and wanting to “close restrooms” are the best one can come up with, then there’s essentially no significant complaint other than the powers at be are now angry the protests have gone on too long.
In college towns across the USA during football season, every weekend is a potpourri of waste, damaged grass, regurgitated booze, noise and the smell of urine far beyond the scale of OWS protests.
The complaints voiced in the AP story are penny ante considering what the movement stands for. However, dissent has long been conditioned out of many in the US culture of lickspittle. Business that pollutes on a grand scale, however, is OK.
When no one is breaking the law one of the first things authority tries to do is redefine breaking the law downward.
This almost always means getting at people for making a mess, loitering, urinating (wooahh, now that’s something that never happens in cleanly American gathering places) too much eating in public, being noisy (which would seem required for democracy) or attracting vermin (and getting stupid people to believe that a plague might break out if something isn’t done).
There are the kinds of laws which are traditionally enforced all the time around the country, rather selectively, when those in control wish to harass unpopular property owners or chase the homeless from place to place.
In the past few decades such things have been used to criminalize just being poor in the US. OWS protests, paradoxically, are inspired by inequality, unfairness and poverty.
These kinds of practices and the people who call for them also justify a rebellion.
Steve Jobs, known for his aggressive and sometimes prickly personality, didn’t hold back when he met President Obama in 2010: The Apple CEO warned Obama he wasn’t going to win re-election. Obama was jeopardizing his re-election prospects because of what Jobs took to be a pervasive anti-business climate in his administration. Jobs cited excessive federal regulations …
“You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” Jobs said during a meeting with the president that took place a year prior to Jobs’ death related to pancreatic cancer …
Though his wife told him that Obama “was really psyched to meet with you,” Jobs insisted on the personal invitation, and the standoff lasted for five days. When he finally relented and they met at the Westin San Francisco Airport, Jobs was characteristically blunt …
After laying into the White House’s purported anti-business outlook, Jobs offered to help Obama repair the rift by arranging meeting between the president and a group of CEOs. When the guest list began to grow, Jobs reportedly resolved to back out of the gathering. Instead, he attended, though he poo-pooed the fancy menu.
Perhaps this is unfair. iSteve was, after all, from this POV just being himself. Uniformly lacking in grace or warmth.
In the outpour over iSteve’s untimely passing most of the pieces read here omitted any of the major fails in his career and how he was handed numerous opportunities to recover.
It was all about his genius, vision and force of will.
This brings back my memory of Mac machines, used for page design work at the Morning Call newspaper, during the period when Bill Gates and Microsoft were blowing Apple off the wrestling mat of personal computing.
All the editors and grunt workers hated the Apples. This was in stark opposition to the general received wisdom that journalists and creative types loved everything Apple.
The machines crashed regularly, were obdurately unsuitable for what they’d been sold for, and were — literally — “da bomb.”
Copy editors joked ruefully about the Mac’s unrecoverable system error message. The bomb would show up and all work would come to a screeching halt, all that had been worked on, toast. It was worse than Windows machines.
And, of course, there’s the drummer in the DD band’s small business network of Apple machines and iPods. Because of my regular exposure to it I never cease to be amazed at how poor all the iTunes-ready music sounds. All freeloaded from Limewire before it was quashed, even coming out of a high-end living room surround stereo system. The tech equivalent of hooking up a Sixties or early Seventies Panasonic radio to a Heathkit tube home stereo amp and basking in the glory of modernity and elegant design, or something.
Today’s notes from the Jeff Bezos virtual sweatshop known as Mechanical Turk furnish more odium.
Whenever you think you’ll just bust if things don’t get more amoral and depraved in pursuit of profit in corporate America, there’s Mechanical Turn to cheer you up and reward.
First question: Who actually does jobs that pay $.02, take fifteen minutes to an hour, and are furnished by anonymous employers who threaten you with blacklisting and ejection from the service if you don’t do right?
Yes, it’s true.
At the Bezos virtual sweat shop you can actually be run off for not being an up-to-snuff slave human machine. You can pick up a horribly blemished resume/HIT report card for being deemed insufficient at jobs which pay pennies.
The Bezos virtual sweat shop has also created a sub-contracting industry for third party virtual sweatshopping. The most obvious example is in verbatim audio transcription.
This company wouldn’t exist, it seems, without Mechanical Turk.
On its website, we read:
Unlike other transcription companies which rely purely on human based transcription, we enable our human transcribers to be more effective through the use of our proprietary web-based transcription workflow management system.
Proprietary workflow management system = hundreds of postings for transcribing the audio flatus of corporate America’s infinite meetings on Mechanical Turk.
“Our transcriptionists must go through our online scoring system, which tests their transcription ability, provides feedback, and helps them improve their transcription quality until it is at the highest quality as measured over the course of a variety of jobs,” it continues.
This means the subcontractor uses the Amazon system and site to run you off should you prove to be an inaccurate or otherwise poor intellectual sweat laborer.
Another great category of work, which you should probably stay away from if you’re a sweat-laborer, is article creation.
“Write an article containing x-number of words on [you name it]” they read.
Most of these appear to be ads by a variety of scumbags in the business of uploading Astro-turfed content pushing businesses, services and products on the web.
You can tell they’re scumbags, and that they expect scumbags to work for them by the screechy commands, demands and veiled threats inside the solicitation.
The commands warn the sweat laborer not to “plagiarize” because the content will be checked by “plagiarism checker” which seems to mostly indicate the employers are trying to generate stuff that won’t get downgraded by Google search robots in spam blogs and miscellaneous insta-sites. Rather than prevent people from gaming the job.
Since these things pay almost nothing why would anyone game them wholesale, anyway?
Also in this category, the jobs for virtually nothing in which one writes phony posts and articles for web places trying to gin up the appearance of actual use and enjoyment.
One of the Bezos sweat shop’s core industries appears then to be generation of content for cheap for the poisoning of Google search.
Of course, there are some interesting tasks.
Generally speaking, you can’t go wrong with university studies.
Academics have not yet lost all their moral underpinnings in 2011 America and research ethics prevent them from getting involved in fraud, cruelty, sadism and capitalizing wholesale on the desperation of others.
Solicitations to take surveys from university departments, or to take part in quick social cognition and decision-making research experiments, are straightforward and honest. And what small compensation they offer is always on the high end of the MTurk scale.
One such Mturk-mediated survey on political attitudes was aimed at determining the test taker’s beliefs vis-a-vis human rights and fairness in this country. And soliciting attitudes over potential protest and violent rebellion against the government.
Imagine that! Fascinating!
DD even found a rock critic/altie mag editor using the virtual sweat shop to get an interview transcribed!
Here’s a jobs advice program on how to buck up if you’re working at under the poverty level (compete with a photo of peanuts on top of a paycheck):
We’ve all pondered quitting our jobs. But unfortunately, for many people the choice is not that easy. After all, having a job means earning a paycheck. But what if that paycheck barely pays enough to cover your bills and expenses?
Whether you’re truly underpaid or not, if you’re barely earning enough money to pay the bills, your choices of what to do are limited. But continuing to work in a job where you’re barely making ends meet can cause burnout and other issues.
The recommendations:
Ask for a raise, take on another slave labor job and — the best — “adopt an attitude of gratitude.”
“Rather than surrounding yourself with negative and unproductive energy, try being grateful for your current situation …” it reads.
I’d ask what manner of swine comes up with this stuff but it’s only rhetorical.
Speaking of the slave labor market, one of the prime exponents of it, Wal-Mart, in the news for more kindnesses today:
Prices aren’t the only thing being slashed at Wal-Mart.
Amid rising costs, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer and the nation’s largest private employer, said Friday that it is cutting health benefits for part-time workers and raising premiums for many of its full-time staff.
At Google, it’s the I-fart-sunshine crowd, where all the employees and bosses are “rockstars,” apparently because of free hair cuts and one-on-one meeting and shit.
To keep employees motivated, agencies need to build a culture of learning, where employees leave more enriched at the end of each day.
A kulchur of learning to enrich you. Please.
Not every project is going to be awesome.
Keeping your rockstar employees on board has always been important, and don’t think that economic uncertainty will keep your employees around. Your company has worked hard to recruit some bright people …
What kind of swine do you have to be to use the word rockstar in reference to employees in corporate America?
In the basements of the Disneyland and Paradise Pier hotels in Anaheim, big flat-screen monitors hang from the walls in rooms where uniformed crews do laundry. The monitors are like scoreboards, with employees’ work speeds compared to one another. Workers are listed by name, so their colleagues can see who is quickest at loading pillow cases, sheets and other items into a laundry machine … Isabel Barrera, a Disneyland Hotel laundry worker for eight years, began calling the new system the “electronic whip” when it was installed last year. The name has stuck.
Tom Bray, a bellman at the Disneyland Hotel for 24 years, makes $8.25 an hour, plus tips, which can be unreliable.
By Local 11’s math, when Walt Disney ran the company in 1966, he made 108 times as much as one of his hotel housekeepers. Bob Iger, the current chief executive, makes 781 times as much as a housekeeper.
After making $28 million in total compensation last year, Iger’s base pay was just increased 25%.
I wonder if there’s an electronic whip in Iger’s office.
Yesterday my attention was drawn to an Andrew Breitbart publicity stunt on BigGovernment, one in which some nobody advertised as a person of experience in computer security, had infiltrated an Occupy Wall Street mailing list and dumped the contents onto the net.
I had a look at them. And for those who take the time to sift through the pile a bit, the net effect is the opposite of what the far right hoped for.
They make the people participating look decent and fairly normal. Just as they appear on television.
There is nothing particularly remarkable or outrageous in the spill, just lots of comments, links to various stories, some complaints about media along with praise, advice on where to march and the usual eye-crossing amount of re-quoting of previous messages in the serial presentation.
For example, from my notes:
Oooh. Here’s dangerous stuff. An e-mail telling OWS readers than when talking to reporters “speak about Wall St. and what it does to people.” Run to the police! Subversion!
There’s an e-mail on how to avoid “kettling,” the tactic British police used in London to squash protests into a narrow area. Seems sensible and legitimate use of free speech to me.
Excerpt on the 17th : “everyone hates bankers and corporations … we are demanding the rich pay for this crisis and that we support peace and justice for all races.”
Another excerpt, poignant: “One of the biggest problems I’ve had as an unemployed person seeking work is the ageism rampant in the job market. It is unbelievable how blatant and ubiquitous this is. And I think a larger number of older people would be drawn to an oppositional movement of resistance if that movement did not replicate such ageism … even sought to address this particular problem.”
One of the primary complaints the defenders of the status quo level at OWS, and any protests in general, is that they’ll lose legitimacy if they dare become uncivil.
Davos Nick Kristof is big on civility. Everyone at the top is.
Okay, we’re all in trouble when the first encampment of Real Americans that Joe discovers is located tucked away “in an affluent suburb of St. Louis.” (No Real Americans in St. Louis itself? How about East St. Louis? Who am I kidding?) At a time of 15 percent real unemployment in the country, and 8.8 percent officially in St. Louis County, is there a reason why I should care particularly what any of these people think? There are a lot of places where you can find what’s really going on in this country, and an affluent suburb of St. Louis isn’t high on that list. Things fall apart even there, alas, because a local Tea Party blowhard goes off ranting and everybody else runs for the canapes.
There’s nothing else here except a little local more local color, and a nice little moment at the end where Joe picks up a broom and helps a guy sweep up a sidewalk. Oh, and there is a lot of talk about civility in our politics, and how we’d all be much better off if everybody would just stop yelling at each other and agree to… wait for it… a Grand Bargain to solve our nation’s many problems …
And when I hear someone, anyone, appeal for a return to “civility,” I generally run headlong to the door.
This country has faced serious problems before, and it has overcome them, and of all the tools it used to overcome them, “civility” is one of the least significant. The fight against slavery took place in a lot of different arenas, public and private, but in none of them was it civil.
“Sylvester Stallone, the star of Rocky, is Johnny Kovac in F.I.S.T., a Gene Corman production of a Norman Jewison film … F.I.S.T, a motion picture achievement that will be talked about and remembered for years to come!”
