Jobs

In order for our economy to function at its highest potential everybody needs to do the job they’re most suited to. In order for our world to move closer towards Utopia we need our economy to operate at its highest potential, but our education system and standard business model does more to stop people from getting the right job than it does to help them.

It’s not standard practice for schools to administer professional personality and aptitude tests to children once let alone doing longitudinal studies on the student body. Children are just judged by whether or not their good at math, science, history, and arts. Then they’re given a piece of paper that says they’re either dumb, average or smart, and then they get thrown to the wolves.

Kids who are either rich or happen to be smart in the right ways get to go to university where they’re pushed to the breaking point intellectually and financially. Half the classes they’ll take will be completely random, and their professors will take great liberties with what/how they teach. Students will learn how to cite essays and regurgitate technical terms. The students who do the best will be the ones who stop asking questions and give their superiors what they want.

Once they graduate they’ll get a piece of paper that says they’re a higher form of life than people who only have a high school diploma. With that ticket through the glass ceiling they’ll enter management jobs where they’ll be tasked with whipping poor, uneducated people to work harder and make their employer richer.

The poor, uncredentialized workers who are turning the cogs of the economy will have to take whatever job they can, and it won’t be doing something they enjoy. They’ll have to give maximum effort for minimum wage, and every time they quit their job to go find a better one they start back at the bottom of the pecking order, and their resume will look more and more unprofessional.

Our economy isn’t designed to put people in the right jobs. It’s designed to make the rich richer and to keep the poor, poor. We have the tools and reasons to make sure people get into the right jobs. We just need to prioritize people over profits.

Here’s a few steps we could take to help people get into the right jobs:

Free education

The glass ceiling of higher education is probably the greatest obstacle to a smooth-functioning economy. We have the technology to provide free online education to the entire world for a fraction of the cost of our current, predatory higher education system. We just don’t have the funding to fulfil the potential of online education. You can help fund it though, and every little bit helps.

Longitudinal personality/aptitude testing

We can’t help people get where they are if we don’t know what they’re capable of. We’d know if we asked everyone, and if we kept testing them we could track where they’re going and then point them in that direction. If they take a job that doesn’t fit their personality profile we could warn them that they might be happier somewhere else.

Civilian AFPC

The United States Air Force has an office called the AFPC (Air Force Personnel Center). Every airman that joins the Air Force gets a file there. It includes all their military training records, job performance reviews and records of awards and reprimands. It’s a cradle to grave tracking system that helps the military keep track of its members and get them to where they need to be. The civilian sector doesn’t have an equivalent office, but if it did it could help people get to where they need to be.

Central job board

There are millions of job boards in America alone. This literally makes it impossible to search all the job openings in the country. If there were one central job board the entire economy would be open to everyone.

Apprenticeships/mentorships

The glass ceiling of higher education splits the work force into castes separated by levels of management. The standard way to make more money is to move up in management. This forces the best and brightest workers to stop working and start micromanaging slaves. This is inefficient and unfair on a thousand levels. People wouldn’t need expensive credentials to get good jobs if employers hired workers under an apprenticeship program similar to how the military takes people off the street and grooms them through short educational courses and on the job training. If the best and brightest workers could keep getting pay raises without having to change jobs they could keep doing what they want and what they’re best at.

On-site housing

People leave jobs they love and take ones they hate because they need as much money as possible to survive since they have to pay as much as possible for everything they buy. The biggest expense in life is rent/mortgages. If workers didn’t have to worry about paying to keep a roof over their head they would be free to work for lower paying (but more fulfilling) jobs. If every business were required to offer free on-site housing for its workers then everyone would be free from the yoke of the land lord. This would free employees to choose the career that suits them.

We already do all of these things to a certain extent.

>>2
No we don't have a theocratic bureaucracy in America for citizens. This theocratic bureaucracy is exclusively for military personnel only. I say theocracy because Atheists often get shot by friendly fire.

You need find a recruiter who is hiding in America with a cell-phone that they never answer. Then you need to prove to them that you are a college graduate and then after all that nonsense is dealt with, they expect you to be able to military press 100 lbs. at MEPS before they can finish processing you. Don't get me started on the triple inefficiency stack. When you get out of the Air Force, you will have successfully wasted more paper than any other branch of the military combined. CHair force indeed.

First we need to put the banks in their place. Children in classrooms are never "too big to fail" and yet the banks are? How is this fair?

Glass-Steagall wouldn’t have prevented the last financial crisis but it would have reduced the damage done in the long run. The loss occurred on the commercial side of the bank, not at the investment bank. But parts of the bet were made with synthetic credit derivatives — something that George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” would never have touched.

If history is any guide, it has been the result of speculative bets. It has been the result of banks making loans to individuals and businesses who can’t pay them back.
Yes, standards became so lax that buyers didn’t have to put money down or prove their income, and financial firms developed dangerous instruments that packaged and sliced up loans, then magnified their bets with more borrowed money.

It starts with banks making basic loans. Making loans “is one of the riskiest businesses banks engage in and has been a major contributing factor to most financial crises in the world over the last 50 years,” Richard Spillenkothen, former director of the division of banking supervision and regulation at the Federal Reserve, wrote in a letter to Politico’s Morning Money on Monday. He said that if Glass-Steagall still existed, it “alone would not have prevented the financial crisis.”

If banks had been limited to ‘plain vanilla’ lending, notwithstanding its admitted riskiness, the financial crisis may well have been less severe or more easily managed and contained.

For employment assistance, I recommend the Job Corps trade school of the United States. About 6 years ago, Obama was talking about a civilian security organization just as huge as the military and through Job Corps, you can get that security clearance to get that job that you always wanted but were too under-qualified to get due to lack of certification. God bless America.

>>5
Good idea. You are not a target of murder by that nation if you are that nation's soldier. Be safe and drink water.

>>6
Or if you are economically valuable.

>>7
Are you suggesting that doctors and bankers have superior value to a soldier?

>>8
Depends really.

If the rebels are trying to storm the presidential palace then each of his loyal bodyguards will be of high value to him.

If he has pneumonia then a doctor that can treat it will be of more value to him than some random soldier in a division he has only seen as a statistic.

>>8
As for bankers, the general needs industrialists to provide logistics for his army which means he needs bankers to deal with their finances, a good banker could improve efficiency and save millions of dollars or whatever currency his banana republic uses.

>>1
So out best bet its to institute sameness in the sense lois lowry presented.
At least for the job market

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To whom it may concern:

Nothing real requires faith.

There is no cure for stupidity.

A well rounded argument is pointless.

A conclusion is simply where you stopped thinking.

We learn from history that we do not learn anything from history.

For every new foolproof invention there is a new and improved fool.

The car stopped on a dime, which unfortunately was in a pedestrian's pocket.

There is no conspiracy. Nobody is in charge. It's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan.

>>16
Those may be right in general but none are strictly true.

Great argument OP and a lot of good points.
Couple of things I thought were worth commenting on:

>Free education
I live in Scotland, where we have this. Everyone gets their higher education paid for by the state (once anyway, you don't get to do two degrees or whatever), and while you still have to pay your own living costs, you can get very cheap loans and good grants for it depending on your circumstances (i.e. living away from home where your parents have low incomes).
I'd say it's a very good thing, and generally Scotland has a pretty good system going on of increasing people's skills (I handle training at the company I work for and we can get a shit ton of grants and funding in all sorts of areas). One thing worth pointing out though is that we have a MASSIVE glut of art students and people doing all sorts of shitty degrees. It's now become the absolute standard that if you wish to enter the job market, you MUST have a degree, simply because everyone has them now. This means everyone goes to University, regardless of what they want to do, choose a soft subject like art history, and then use that education to go work in a bar or whatever. That's an enormous waste of resources that could have gone to increasing someone's skills, but instead four years and thousands of pounds has been spent making your city's barmen better at abstract art. Overall I'd still say it's a good thing to have, but it needs some work and reforming, but I'd say it was worth a closer look at as somewhere it's been put into practice.

>Longitudinal personality/aptitude testing
Totally agree with this. Might even solve a lot of the problems I mentioned above, where people spend far too much time being educated in something they'll never use. We did one aptitude test at the end of high school and it was complete shite ("would you rather work with food, or documents. you have answered documents. would you rather work with documents or chemicals? you have answered documents. conclusion: you should work with documents"). Do proven, effective ones exist though, which can accurately match a person and their skills to certain jobs?
I think it's an absolutely great idea, but do the systems actually exist to implement it properly?

>Civilian AFPC
Another good idea. Think similar things exist here, but fragmented over different departments and with very limited scope e.g. one department has an idea of what you did and high school and where you went after leaving, with an aim to push you in a direction, but then forgets you.

>Apprenticeships/mentorships
Again, another great idea. Personally I think everyone should start at the bottom rung of their industry, with the education coming later and based on aptitude, interest and need. Why train someone in high end chemistry when they've never been in a lab, only to put them back to square one when they start anyway? If you do a business degree you learn very high level concepts, only to go start in the mail room anyway.

>On-site housing
Have to say I disagree with this one. Having been in the navy for a number of years, I wouldn't want to go back to that kind of rigidity in living situation. Right now, being able to choose where you live, you can reject sub-standard housing outright, make decisions and sacrifices based on personal preferences (face a longer commute time but the appeal of the countryside, or you can be more in the city and close to work if you don't mind noise and small space), bad areas can just be avoided outright, etc. I don't really see much advantage to having on-site housing. The problems of high rent I would say lie elsewhere to do with taxation and wealth distribution; I'd say the values are artificially bumped up by investment into the housing market increasing demand artificially, and part of this in the UK anyway is the bizarre rules regarding taxable investments which make property investments a good prospect. The end result is you compete with someone to buy a house that they don't even want anyway, and the price gets driven up with no increase in quality or efficiency.

Anyway, as I said, very good post OP and I think you've really made a lot of great points. It's a shame it will all be lost on this shitty board, but I really think you should consider taking it further (write a letter of proposals to your equivalent of what would be your version of an education minister? Write an article and submit it somewhere? Not sure, they're good proposals anyway and worth bringing to attention).

>>18
Everyone gets their higher education paid for by the state
Don't you have competition or something? Because in Russia there is only a limited number of free tickets, given to the highest scored students, who always happen to be Jewish, like this cocksucking Perelman.

Ok, I know Slavs are ignorant village people, without love for education, but that doesn't mean State should empower Jews, who have whooping 6000 years tradition of respecting knowledge.

I hate personally hate any competition, we should just genocide all Jews and give everyone equal opportunity.

http://www.empoweringjewswithdisabilities.org
http://www.totallyjewish.com/news/national/c-13853/cameron-i-will-empower-uk-jews/

http://www.jewishlouisville.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1967
JDC and JAFI Empower Jews in Israel and Ukraine

Where everything in Israel is modern, Kiev is not. Even 20 years removed from Soviet rule, Ukraine is still struggling to come into the modern era. The ORT schools in Israel have the newest smartboard technology; in Kiev, they were using traditional blackboards. But secular and educational standards are the same in both places.

While American and Israeli Jews have similar perspectives, Ukrainian Jews have a very different one, starting with the center of Jewish life. In America, most Jews are raised Jewish. They go to synagogue with their families and religious school on Sundays. When it is time to start preparing for a bar or bat mitzvah, children attend the Hebrew school through their synagogues or temples.

In Kiev, three synagogues serve an estimated 200,000 Jews – a huge difference compared to even Louisville, with five synagogues for 8,500 Jewish people.

Add to that 30 years of Soviet rule, where almost all religious practice was banned. The Baby Boom generation in Kiev has no relationship with Judaism. Instead, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Agency for Israel must create that relationship, starting with the youngest age groups. The children then take it home to their parents, where the embers of religion can be rekindled.

The other issues facing Kiev Jews are purely economic. Many, especially the elderly and those living outside the city, live on very small government pensions that hardly allow for any food after rent and utilities are paid. The JDC provides food and medications to those in need.