The jobs mix: good and bad

People want jobs to earn money to pay for their needs and wants while putting a little aside for retirement. Businesses provide jobs to make and sell their useful and useless products and services to the workers while making profits that will ensure a pleasant retirement. Governments promote economic growth policies that encourage the creation of jobs without taking into account the true value of many of the job categories.

Let us rate the value to society and the environment of a range of job categories. Governments, economists, businesses and the media do not take into account what jobs do to the environment but we will because we are realists and they are illusionists. We will list the categories in our perceived order of value. So most people will need to go towards the bottom of the list to find the category that seems to indicate what they do for a living. That will encourage them to think and maybe they will becomes realists rather than pragmatists.

Here we go:

1. providing understanding of the damge the operation of the systems of civilization are irrevocably doing to the natural life support system
2. providing the young, aged and disadvantaged in society with aid, care and compassion
3. teaching and lecturing on how to use sound information to develop useful physical and mental skills
4. providing knowledge on how to manage biodiversity to limit the harm being done by human-introduced measures, including irrigation for farming 
5. teaching and lecturing on how society can manage a sustainable life style using a minimum of natural resources
6. providing essential health, policing, information,organizational, management, banking, housing, food, energy and  water supply, sanitation, maintenance, transportation services together with recreational and remedial facilities.
7. promoting beneficial physical and mental activities, including participation in sport, playing musical instruments, having stimulating hobbies and enjoying social groups
8. being an engineer who specializes in the maintenance and prolonging the effective operational life of all forms of infrastructure, including land, sea and air vehicles together with roads, tunnels and bridges.
9. promoting devices to save on using energy on the pretext that will help to stop climate change
10. farming using fertilizers, pesticides and machinery
11. teaching and lecturing on how to achieve a high material standard of living
12. driving trucks through cities loaded with containers 
13. mining irreplaceable natural resources
14. mining coal, oil and natural gas for export to make money for foreign and local investors 
15. promoting, marketing and selling stuff that sales-addicted people do not really want
16. contributing to the design and construction of high rise buildings that will be dependent on the continuing availability of services during their lifetime

Many of the jobs at the bottom of the list will vanish down the black sink hole as realism takes over from the delusion that society has had for in recent times.

Information impotence

Society is becoming besotted with the exponential growth of information. The innovators of the devices that store and communicate the vast amount of information are revered. Many people, especially the young, want to have the latest versions of these devices. Desk top computers are now regarded as ancient relics. However, society does not take into account three fundamental issues that will ensure that the information revolution is unsustainable. The demise of the copious information era this century is certain, despite all the contrary hype.

The intangible information is always stored and communicated by tangible devices and systems made of mined materials by the use of natural forces. This has always been the case and will always be the case, even in the distant future when few of these devices are still around. Despite the general view that people have been clever to invent the technology that is the basis of the information revolution, all they have done is use some natural forces in a novel fashion. Most people think some clever people developed electricity but all they did was invent machines to generate electricity using natural forces. Nature has been producing electricity for eons. Lightning provides us with reminders of the power of these natural forces. The materials used in the manufacture of these devices has been mined  but many of the deposits are running out. Some of these materials are being recycled but most of them are ending there short lives in land fill.

The second issue is that most of the information is misleading, wrong or useless. Nature provides sound information in seeds that enable the replenishment of a vast range of organisms from trees through to humans. Humans have used misleading information to generate technology without taking into account the deleterious consequences, such as climate change. The information about monetary forces is wrong as it does not take into account the ecological costs of the activities financed. The economic growth that this information promotes is not sustainable, as society at large will learn the hard way in coming decades. The bewildered masses will wonder how the political leaders got their information so wrong. They will find that most of the information they have been fed is useless as they try to cope with the inevitable powering down.

Education involves the transfer of information. Most of this information transfer is aimed at providing students with the know how to operate in society. The information that teaches people how to relate with others, do useful things such a grow food and how to contribute to community activities is very useful. People are now addicted to getting information from such sources as TV without thinking through its usefulness. They are sold the benefits of having a car or going on overseas tours without the being informed