Are there any occupations you uniquely oppose the existence of?
I did retirement home training and used to think it was a sweet job. Then I got in the business and underestimated how demoralizing it was as they give you the easy elders in training while the others make you, or at least me, really think of the fact the job just amounts to an unkarmic freebie.
Landlords. Do I think it's terrible for some nice old person to rent their basement to students for a good price for a bit of income in retirement? No. But corporate landlords and people hoarding housing can fuck off.
One of the reasons Boeing sucks is this. First reason is McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeings money, hallowed out the soul that built the world’s greatest aircraft, then sold what was left off to the big investment funds. Then the investment funds were like “look at all this money Boeing is spending on safety and suppliers” so they cut out the safety and bought out the suppliers. The horror stories of quality control at some of the suppliers is just as bad if not worse than some of the horror stories of quality control at Boeing. What if I told you Boeing fought to have ECS (environmental control systems) software that was written by third world “programmers” that didn’t speak English to remain on their aircraft illegally, claiming it didn’t pose a threat to safety, you know those systems that determine if there is enough oxygen to breath at altitude and whether the temperature inside the plane is survivable…
Currently work in biotech, and have worked in medtech; I have had to integrate systems with insurers (payors is the industry term). I know exactly how fucked it is on a statistical level.
I used to work for an insurer. Our entire health system is just a steaming pile of crap. Providers will double or triple bill. Hospitals raise their rates through the absolute roof so they have room for negotiations. The uninsured people more often than not get billed at the unnegotiated rate which is many times what it should be. If the insurers are short on money or profit margins are down and their stockholders are angry they end up turning down shitloads of procedures looking at the statistics for what's least likely to cause lawsuits and death. Medicare requires you to go and recertify every patient every year, Mr Johnson's an amputee, well you better get him back in to make sure he still is or you're not going to pay for DME. Half the big insurers are still running on Big iron of one form or another, FTP over SSL coming hot off of mainframe.
Well, lobbyists work not only for evil corpos, but also for NGOs and movements... Lobbyism is the process to sway politics to a direction through interpersonal meetings, and is necessarily in a democracy.
However, one thing that would benefit the US is transparency around lobbyists; who they are, how they are funded, their agenda etc. The EU has a database on registered lobbyists and the transparency helps with parts of the problem.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's folks doing sane, evidence-based care in this area. But I've seen so much bullshit from practitioners, ranging from the grossly unethical to the blatantly dangerous, that I find them hard to trust about anything as a group.
Besides, we already have health professionals that can provide good, evidence-based care (issues like ego v. evidence/new findings to improve care notwithstanding - but there's crappy people in all fields) - we call them doctors and nurse practitioners. And we need more of those.
I'm not sure I do, but one thing I haven't seen mentioned here yet is consumer psychologists. I once read an argument that they could be improving people's mental health, instead they are working on manipulating people into buying more.
How about if I drop that hatred by 22% with a 2.1% financing? And throw in a free coupon to Chili's if you verify within the next 45 minutes! Hurry act now we're running low on coupons. And you don't want to go home empty handed, do you?
There's a city in France - Toulouse, IIRCEDIT: Correction: it is Grenoble - where the mayor ran on a promise that "if you elect me, I'll remove all the billboards." Turns out that was really popular, so now that city does not have any billboards.
ETA:A video about it. (Dutch, but it has (auto-generated) English subtitles)
I once saw a video report on bullshit jobs, where they also interviewed a researcher into how much value is gained or destroyed by various professions.
They said that for every £1 (the researchers worked in the UK) given to marketing executives, that society suffered £11 in lost value.
Seems useful to me. If I'm selling my house I don't want to spend a bunch of my own time setting up all the showings and being there for each one. And if I have to trust someone else to do it, they should be licensed and trackable in case something goes wrong.
It does seem like a job that attracts lazy people though, and it also seems like there are way too many agents in general.
Realtors are fucking useless, they provide none of the information you actually need but you have to go through them to figure out what the deal is with a space.
Read up on the shit people like Eric Hermann has done buying up debt from distressed countries, then siphoning off their aid money to cover those debts. Zero humanity.
Hear me out: Many circus performers are multi disciplined, or put on an incredible display of training and talent. The last big top I went to had a knife throwing couple who also did a fantastic roller skating routine, a few very talented clowns/jugglers, and a bike troupe in a ball of death. Just to name a few. These people have devoted days or years of their lives to their craft. Do you know how hard it is to ride a bicycle across a tight rope with someone on your shoulders?
The Human Cannonball? He got launched out of the cannon and did one flip before getting caught by the net. That's all he did that night, yet he came out and bowed with the rest of the performers like he was an equal contributor.
The Human Cannonball? He got launched out of the cannon and did one flip before getting caught by the net.
That's what it looks like to the untrained eye. But they're not really going to fire a person out of a cannon. That's not safe. So he just huddles in the cannon, they light a decoy fuse, it makes a bang (with no projectile), and he spring out and jumps that distance by himself. Requires a lot of core and leg strength.
HR only contributes to the good of the business, which is owned by the capitalist class. It’s a class war, and HR is not on the side of the working class. Which makes HR employees—witting or not—class traitors, something they have in common with cops.
Company stooges seems a more appropriate department title than human resources, also who the fuck wants to be called a resource I'm a human being not a number.
That's because you only ever dealt with them from the employee's side. They contribute to the good of the company/organization. Sometimes that also means good for the employee, but that's just coincidence.
I think it's because they use their position to professionalise a bullshit job, presenting it as a field (HR Management), when their skills are rather ordinary. Really, they should be doing payroll and employment admin, not setting the tone for the organisation or being seen as specialists in any meaningful way. Also, job competencies and profiles disproportionality reward the "skills" found in HR, which i think reflects their input in designing these tools and templates.
Further, i find people who work in this field to have quite a high opinion of themselves and their usefulness.
Guidance counselors. One of them tried to convince my parents that I was on drugs...in 4th grade. Turned out that I had an undiagnosed mental disorder.
I had similar experiences. It's like there's a small but noticeable subset of the population that wants to pin "drug user" on any person they meet and think is weird. Meanwhile, actual drug users are everywhere and mostly manage to act normal.
The "management" should be seen as positions to help the employees to do their work properly, not to rule over them (but helping would necesarily need to include some level of reviewing the work and if really necesary organize disciplinary measures).
From my personal experience I defintly conclude that a company where the management serves the employees get better results than companies where managment are little wannabee generals.
(I am also currently middle management and hope I do this right.)
Any sanitation worker, sewage diver, drain block remover, in most of the third-world countries.
We need city drainages to be repaired, cleaned, maintained, and managed with draconian safety, extremely well-compensated, hazardpay up the wazoo workers comp and complete-healthcare all covered for life. So many workers are just abused for the lifeline work that keep a city's arteries from getting clogged and flowing smoothly.
I saw how Korean drain-workers do it with high-pressure water jets and incredible efficiency and knowhow talent of their vital job. I wish we didnt have the corruption that prevents this type of training, trained worker, worker pride in the essential labour that they do.
Same goes for recycling and reducing waste. We humans don't do nearly enough and the Top-20 major corporations that cause 80% of worldwide pollutants go unchecked and unpunished.
If you’re saying that you uniquely oppose the existence of elder care as an occupation, then that is a very strange, and frankly worrisome example. Am I misinterpreting what you meant? Also, I don’t know what to make of “unkarmic freebie.”
Having known some people in elder care, the reality is that some old people are nasty, brutish, mean, racist, misogynist, creepy, violent, you fucking name it, there's some old person you're going to have to take care of who matches that horrible personality. You're paid the same whether you're helping someone you like or someone who is rude and assaults you every time you enter the room.
I agree with you, elder care should still exist, but I can see why some people get tired of taking care of terrible old people who were likely terrible people all their lives and who are just allowed abuse you. Why are they allowed to abuse you? Because most people who do elder care and underpaid, overworked, and don't have a lot of other options that pay nearly as well. Basically you're accepting middling but better than fast-food pay to have abuse dumped on you. I can see how someone feels like its a karmic freebie because there's no responsibility in any of it, generally management won't do anything about "problem elders." Get to be a fucking asshole your whole life and then get to be a fucking asshole to the person wiping your ass before you die.
I have a similar story from another friend who ended up at a mental health hospital in a violent youth ward. He was underpaid, overworked, and responsible for about 30 violent and dangerous kids with unstable mental health issues that made them difficult to approach. If he was busy helping one kid take their meds, and another kid on the ward was in the same moment trying to take their own life and succeeded, he would be the one responsible. He was not being paid enough or had enough support to justify taking full responsibility for things that are outside his control when he cannot magically manage 30 dangerous cases at once. He left the job after two months of assaults and scares. I don't blame him, and he doesn't blame himself, and we also understand that those 30 cases deserve better care than they're getting but it's not his responsibility as an individual to make up for the shortcomings of government funding for this.
Same with people who work elder care. It's not their individual responsibility to make up for the fact that these companies don't give a damn about the people they're caring for, and each elder is just an income stream in a database. The number of people I know in elder care who now have permanent back problems because they're being expected to lift 300lb old people off their beds and they're not being given proper equipment for it is too damn high. These people do not deserve to have their bodies broken and paid pennies on the dollar to be abused by the elders in their care, not given the right tools to do the job, with a prevailing attitude of "they're just old people, how bad can they hurt you really?" Pretty fucking bad, shockingly.
Elder care needs to exist. Does it need to exist as it exists now in the USA? Abso-fucking-lutely not.
In the kids case, that’s a staffing issue. Most lockdown mental health facilities have a tech/CNA whose sole job it is to walk around and log the location and state of every patient every 9-15min, depending on policy. In addition to the techs/CNAs who herd everyone to group, meals, and all the rest. In addition to mental health staff that run the groups. In addition to nurses who do meds and assessments. In addition to “orderlies”, not big men in white like in movies, who tackle people these days, but people with intense training in deescalation.
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In the elder case, that is often a staffing issue. If it’s day shift and you have more than 6 residents assigned to you, that’s a staffing and/or state level regulation issue. If it’s evening shift and you have more than 8 residents assigned to you, that’s a staffing and/or state regulation issue. But yes, declining mental health (dementia) and brain deterioration (Alzheimer’s) is part of elder care. Sometimes it’s the sole reason they’re placed in a home, because that decline in brain capacity requires 24h care.
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A lot of health care jobs would be absolutely ok if they were actually safe for both patients and staff. But corporate greed often doesn’t allow for that.
Staffing matters. And it often will be ignored until the state mandates a law that requires the corporate owners to do better.
Dementia often causes personality changes. It can make really nice people into assholes, and it can turn people who were real bastards into the reverse.
There has to be a better way to keep the strengths of federating without partitioning the community smaller and smaller until there is no community left.
Can you imagine Lemmy with a similar amount of Reddit users? Anytime you'd post, you'd have to replicate it between X number of instances (for visibility). Conversations would be fragemented and duplicated, votes would be duplicated. To me this almost sounds like "work"...
There has to be something better.
For example, instead of "every instance is an island". Meaning the current hierarchy is "instance" - > "community" - > "post" - > "threads". We could instead have "community (ie: asklemmy)" - > "post (ie: this post)" - > "instance (Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.world, etc)" - > "threads (this comment)".
From a technical perspective, it would mean that each instance would replicate the community names and posts. Which is already beginning done (this post is a perfect example), but as long as each instance would share a unique identifier to associate the two communities/posts as "the same thing" (and this could simply be the hash of the community /post name). Everything else would be UX. Each instance would take ownership of the copy of the community and post, which means they could moderate it according to their standards.
I often feel the same working in mental health, especially with medically complex patients who have lost their own legal-medical decision making rights.
There's the obvious high stakes ethical debates like if someone has a gangrenous limb that will kill them should you force them to have it removed. But there's a lot more common / lower stakes examples I run into more often. Say someone has a dietary restriction that not following will likely cause great harm. Say they can't swallow effectively (more common than you think, especially with strokes). This person is demanding a burger. It's more likely than not that they will choke and die on that burger. Do you let them have the burger? You could argue that a sane person would obviously choose life over a burger but I might argue that American culture in particular makes the ability to consume burgersenjoy life more important than lengthening it (not entirely true, OP is probably one of the few people here who wouldn't be shocked what people put elders through in the name of extending life). In the end its a complex debate with a huge amount of individual nuance that I don't claim to have all the answers to.
I can tell you that I kinda wanna go work hospice where I don't even have to ask any of those questions and can just give them the fucking burger.
Kudos to the people who actually adhered to the "unique" part of this. No, you're not unusual for hating money men. It's only a matter of time until someone posts "cops".
The entire entertainment industry is gross and depressing seen from anywhere close to the inside, but I'm not sure I'd really say I oppose it in concept.
I thought you meant military occupations and I was so confused. Like asking what's the one military occupation you oppose (you aren't allowed to oppose any others)