Subject: Re: Job Rankings



>Using data from the government, trade groups and telephone surveys,
>Krantz ranked 250 jobs according to six criteria: income, stress,
>physical demands, potential growth, job security and work environment.


translation:  depending on the criteria you use in your sorting
function, you can arrange anything in any way you like.

this is a blatant piece of crap that goes out of its way to suck up to
the demographic most likely to be reading it online.   it seems pretty
obvious that the list was arranged to put desk jockeys at the top, and
manual laborers at the bottom, then the incidential criteria were
twiddled to provide a few "noteworthy surprises" like low rankings for
the presidency, baseball stars, and supermodels.   it's pure bias,
dressed up with numbers to make it look like statistics.


i'd love to see the actual rankings, weightings, and associations this
person used to develop the list.   one thing seems readily apparent:
Physical Labor Is Bad.   if you have to move anything more than a mouse,
your trade is in the bottom half of the list.   as a matter of fact,
there are only a smattering of trades that have any association with
physical activity anywhere in the top 100.

apparently the ideal career is one where you sit on your ass all day,
getting fat and flirting with carpal tunnel syndrome.. the bulk of the
top twenty are all typing-intensive.

interesting trend for a dream-jobs list compiled be someone who makes
his living by sitting and typing.   also interesting is the fact that
'freelance writer' doesn't appear to be in the list anywhere.. wonder
where that would rank?





>Krantz also lists the jobs with the best perks. At the top of that list
>are geologists (No.60), 

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!!!

i know a couple.. let's tick through those 'perks':


>who get subsidized housing during field work,

a tent.. with food and beer trucked in weekly from whatever small-town
grocery store is nearest to the chunk of nowhere on which your tent
sits.   the quality of the food and the quantity of the beer are a
factor of the amount of time you need to stay on site and the amount of
funding for supplies that actually exists..


>private offices,

if you're tenured.. then it's somewhere on the fourth floor of a
building the university barely remembers it owns and doesn't maintain
because it has to fly all 87 members of the football team, plus
associated entourage, to Honolulu.. oh yes, and buy them all new
uniforms..

your office furnishings consist of a desk built in 1943 with one drawer
that sticks, a twelve-year-old swivel chair with peeling vinyl
upholstery and one stuck caster, some bookshelves, a 386 computer, and a
monitor with a burned-in screen.   university services says that they'll
be wiring your building for network access some time in the next couple
of years, if nothing more pressing comes up.. and the walls are painted
that institutional green that looks like bleached phlegm..

the view out your window includes part of the next wing of the building,
a parking lot, some train tracks, and the student housing across the
street..


>paid trips to exotic locations

someplace in the middle of Siberia where carbon dioxide freezes, but
which has metamorphic inclusions that contain new evidence about the
existence of bacteria during the Cretatious period.

assuming your grant got funded..


>and secretaries 

undergrad student labor..


>and researchers 

graduate student labor..


>to help with the nuts-and-bolts of the job.

and once you've finally trained one to do the job properly, so you don't
have to hover over their shoulder, you get maybe one more dig's worth of
work out of them, then they get their doctorate and move on to their own
career.   and you start all over with a new batch who barely know which
end of the hammer you use to hit the rock..

of course the *real* nuts and bolts.. writing grant proposals, running
around trying to find new sources of cash to support the fieldwork you
want to do, and playing politics within the university.. are up to you.




this is obviously a case of someone looking at the names of symbols
without bothering to find out anything regarding the substance behind
the names.