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A CNN Viewer Has Questions for Mike Rowe

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Re: A CNN Viewer Has Questions for Mike Rowe

#201

Post by mortyseinfeld »

infruset wrote: post #70
bcoates wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American culture leads kids to believe that trades jobs have low social standing, so they borrow obscene amounts of money to go to college because they think it will get them a good job where they do paperwork for lots of money. Instead they wind up in debt working in an unskilled retail sales or service job, or just unemployed. If they had gone to a legitimate trade school[1] or even just an entry-level manual labor…

Thanks. I was a bit confused. In my country college is almost free.. I feel for you guys.

In your country college is not almost free.....think about it.

Re: A CNN Viewer Has Questions for Mike Rowe

#202

Post by bluedino »

randomdata wrote: post #99
eshvk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this going to solve anything? All this is going to do is bring in a flood of applicants to the job that has no listing of a college degree as a requirement. Then HR is going to reject a bunch of applications. At the end you are just moving the barrier to an internal portal.

What you do, however, is remove the reason job seekers go to college in the first place. There are not that many jobs that actually require a degree, other than as a superficial filtering mechanism, so you can take them out of that system. The result is that demand for college decreases, therefore the price will decrease through the properties of supply and demand, which leaves an education that returns to being affo…

Remember that the old filter was "is the applicant white?"

Re: A CNN Viewer Has Questions for Mike Rowe

#203

Post by philangist »

shubb wrote: post #123
bittercynic wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pseudo-libertarian nonsense is unpleasant for me, too, but I see great value in cheer leading for blue collar work. I don't know of anyone else saying "Blue collar work is an honorable thing to do, and you're a fool to judge someone for doing it." At least no one with as high a profile as MR.

Some people do seem to genuinely look down on 'blue collar' work. Last week, my sisters friends went for a meal out to celebrate her birthday. Her boyfriend drives freight trains, and seems to get some strange attitude from her friends. They are mostly working for free while trying to break into film, or journalism. A few are teachers, which the others seem to see as 'giving up'. Yes, they are hipsters. I loved this…

That's hilarious. I wish I could've seen her reaction.

Re: A CNN Viewer Has Questions for Mike Rowe

#205

Post by stinkytaco »

randomdata wrote: post #124
stinkytaco wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be a wee bit disingenuous as well. There are a few issues with so called "skilled labor" right out of high school: 1. Skilled jobs are hard jobs. They are often limited to men strictly due to the physical ability required (I used to work as a diesel mechanic and it was simply not a job that could be done by most women). This is obviously not universally true: machining, some welding, virtually all e…

Can you clarify #4? I'm actually struggling to see how my programming skills can apply to other jobs in any meaningful way outside of the realm of programming. I mean, sure, if Microsoft left Seattle today, I could probably find another software company in town to work for. However, I expect at one point in time, machinists could walk into another shop with ease too. There is no reason to believe programmers will alw…

I think that most "skilled labor" is more specialized than people realize. As a diesel mechanic I could go a lot of places (urban areas were generally out; I would need to live in the suburbs, where there were truck stops). A programmer, on the other hand, has the option to freelance, work from home, even start his own business with limited or no capital. Any company of any decent size probably hires programmers once and a while or even has a few on staff, but it's not really that easy if your specialty is hyperbaric welding (which you can make a small fortune doing, to be fair). No one "bootstraps" a mechanic's shop, too much space and specialized equipment.

But that's still pretty flexible. I'm thinking about all these super industry specific jobs Rowe talks about on his show. Agricultural specialties, oil rig workers, aircraft mechanics and so on. Just not that easy to live close to home and family and do that for a living.

Re: A CNN Viewer Has Questions for Mike Rowe

#206

Post by Crito »

taeric wrote: post #146
Crito wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think inability to perform these jobs is the limiting factor. In the past, larger percentages of the population have had hard labor jobs. Maybe we're all fatter, but if we are talking about 18 year olds getting into a physically demanding job, that should be far less of an issue (less of an issue as it would be for, say, a 35 year old, who has had 17 more years of their body decaying and 17 more years of eati…

My guess is that the ages of the people involved in many of these situations is a touch higher than 18. Also, beware considerations of the past. In the past, larger percentages of the population died before hitting 15 years of age.

Yes, most unemployed people are probably much older than 18. However most people making the decision to go to college, or go into various trades, are 18 or younger. That seems to be the age bracket Mike Rowe is primarily talking about.

Re: A CNN Viewer Has Questions for Mike Rowe

#207

Post by conjecTech »

randomdata wrote: post #149
shubb wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people do seem to genuinely look down on 'blue collar' work. Last week, my sisters friends went for a meal out to celebrate her birthday. Her boyfriend drives freight trains, and seems to get some strange attitude from her friends. They are mostly working for free while trying to break into film, or journalism. A few are teachers, which the others seem to see as 'giving up'. Yes, they are hipsters. I loved this…

I both farm and write software professionally. I find the differences in reactions that I get, depending on which career I claim to have, to be quite amazing.

That sounds like a great setup. Care to give more details?

Re: A CNN Viewer Has Questions for Mike Rowe

#208

Post by conjecTech »

kevando wrote: post #54
Aloha wrote: post #43

He's spot on. We Americans focus so very very often on how we disagree rather than how we agree. If you look at both parties, they broadly agree on so many things. Instead we focus on unimportant social issues, shaving a couple percent off government spending, and so on. The educational system we have now is largely a scam, it promises that if you spend tens of thousands (or more) dollars on a 4 year degree, you'd ha…

Mike Rowe is the bomb. He also has an a classic TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...

Thank you for posting that. He was able to put into words many of the things I had felt for years, but never spent the time to fully quantify.

Re: A CNN Viewer Has Questions for Mike Rowe

#209

Post by yusyusyus »

derleth wrote: post #78
pnathan wrote: post #38

I hadn't heard about Mike Rowe until he started his program to popularize the trades. It's an interesting perspective, and I don't really have a beef about it. But let me make a few factual points, borne out of my experience and the experience I have in growing up around tradespeople and being related to tradespeople. * The trades are physically hard labor edit: It might not be clear what this entails, as perhaps not…

> the number of immigrants doing these same hard work in unpleasant conditions while native-born "modern Americans" moan about being unable to find work. Are jobs that pay less than minimum wage even offered to citizens or documented immigrants?

Yes. 1099 your ass and don't you dare ask for 1.5x OT while paying $8.50/hr and doing 50-60 hour weeks.

Or 'unpaid internships'. You can argue the experience, but the law is the law.

Re: A CNN Viewer Has Questions for Mike Rowe

#210

Post by hatbert »

derekp7 wrote: post #91
quaunaut wrote: post #23

> Think about it. Universities get to decide how much money to charge their students. Likewise, parents and students decide if they can afford to pay it. It’s a pretty simple proposition. But when the government suddenly makes hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans readily available — under the popular (and voter-friendly) theory that “everyone should go to college” — we see an unintended consequence. Well…

How much does it actually cost to educate a student? A full load is about 12 or so hours a week in class (at least back when I went to community college). If a class has 40 students, and the instructor spends 2 hours outside of class for every 1 hour teaching (office hours, curriculum structure, grading), and makes 80K a year, that is 2K per student per year. Now add in the facilities expenses (roof, walls, lights, h…

The short answer is: "Administrators"

I'm a nearly-finished Ph.D. candidate, and when people complain to me about how bloated and inefficient the government is, I think to myself "Wow, that sounds like a pretty good system."

A typical graduate teaching assistant at my university has about 10 lab sections per academic year. The lab fees--just the lab fees, not tuition--from just one section is enough to pay the TA's salary for the entire year. Even if you include the outrageously-inflated graduate tuition that a TA-ship pays, lab fees from just three lab sections cover the entire compensation package.

The tuition from just one big lecture section is enough to pay a tenured professor's salary for almost two entire years (and a tenured professor should be teaching 5-6 courses per year).

Some of the rest of the money goes to pay for the country-club campus, but most of it disappears into the black hole of bureaucracy.

And we haven't even started to talk about the scam of "overhead" that the university charges on federal research grants--30% straight off the top, except for very large purchases. Want to have a new electrical outlet installed in the lab? You have to use the university's maintenance department (and its inflated hourly rates--at least 3x what you'd pay a licensed/bonded union electrician) and pay overhead on top of that!

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