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.

Science and technology myth

We have been entranced over the years with myths.They tend to add spice to our lives as we spread the around amongst our friends. They can be quite entertaining. But they can also cause a lot of problems.

The biggest myth has been around for centuries  It is the myth that science and technology (S&T) can create things and systems useful to society. You may say that is not a myth as you think of the numerous items that science and technology has produced. That is right. S&T has produced a bewildering array of systems, devices and services - by employing natural forces to irreversibly use some of the limited natural material resources. S&T has not created any material thing The only thing it has created is the anthropocentric illusion that humans can control the erection, operation and maintenance of the temporary edifice of civilization and the provision of natural services.

Ironically, as structural problems emerge, the powerful in society vainly urge the use of S&T to solve the problems that S&T has produced. They want S&T to chase its tail!