What job or profession do you have the least respect for?

[oldjones]

oldjones, I just gotta say this here since your inbox is inaccessible: how do you remain so consistently rational, calm, convincing and reasonable? How do you resist the pull of head-assploding rage at all the dumbfuckery that dumb motherfuckers shout from the fucking rooftops? So calm. Sane. Always with a coherent, salient argument to make that is near irrefutable. I don't know whether I love you or hate you, but damned if I don't always breath a sigh of relief whenever I see one of your posts in a thread.

(sorry if my admiration tears your edifice down a notch merely by association. It shouldn't. You sir, are the anti-nobody. ...motherfucker!)

Sorry my shuttered inbox made you be so public. You're very kind, and I'm very embarrassed.

But the box is still closed; I've chosen forums, which are public spaces.

On the topic: I'm really stunned at the number of people who imagine it serves any purpose—personal or public—simply to name an occupation they despise. First of all it's bigotted, as proven by some of the more thoughtful who do go on to say they don't really mean all cops, pols, lawyers, teachers, (or whoever). The teacher's one is even sadder when posters show that although they acquired the minimal literacy required to post, that very evidence shows what they owe their teachers, and the defects of what they've done on their own since.

But none of these despicable posters has offered even the faintest suggestion of how they'd improve the professions they hate, nor even how they'd propose we could operate without such jobs being done for us. Whether it's a mother teaching a baby how to take the nipple, someone intervening to calm a dispute, protect a victim or peaceably settle a quarrel, we invented teachers, cops, lawyers and politicians as soon as we stopped eating the kids next door and started trying to live together. Despising and disrespecting jobs we always need done is the lowest sort of self-important and ignorant stupidity.

Here's the real question that every poster with a nomination should be asking themself: When did telling someone you despise them improve their attitude, performance and behaviour? How will your attitude help recruit better candidates? When did you last encourage the good you saw in a politician, a lawyer, a police officer or a teacher? Or ask them how they see us? When you're helpless and needy in the nursing home, don't call out, "Hey, Asswipe! Over here!" if you want them to see you as anything but an incompetent shit.

Anyway, answering for the disrespect I've tactlessly shown for some posters here, I'll try to leave this topic to others.

 

[Kailani]

Televangelists.

 

[oldjones]

It is more difficult to become a professional athlete than a brain surgeon. That is why professional athletes are paid enormous sums. Plus for every one that succeeds, there are thousands more left scrounging for peanuts.

No, they are paid those sums because guys can make even more enormous amounts by selling the right to watch those professionals playing children's games, and then selling the right to advertise unnecessary products to those watchers. If the gate and media money was as good they'd pay them to play donkey-baseball. And did.

No one pays professional athletes just for being good at their sport. Defining and parsing the relevant subtleties of 'it's more difficult' would quickly become as boring as pro sports as a whole. When guys are drafted and earning in the big leagues—even on losing teams—right out of high school or college, I'd say you must have forgotten that there's still grad school and internships needed to qualify as a beginning general surgeon. Let alone a specialist one. Those demanding years of learning their craft, art and science—not to discount their practised and superior physical skills—are why brain surgeons do get paid for what they do. Not to mention, because losing surgical teams are extremely rare.

But, how 'bout them Leafs eh?

 

[AdamH]

What I don't understand is how people fall for that.

I didn't fall for that one, but after my first kid was born we got roped into for paying into a particular RESP (which I won't name).. We were called up just days after our kid was born, told that they had been "given" our information by the hospital (they likely paid some nurse for the info).. The rep came over and talked really fast about how we needed to sign with them.. The way she spoke about it, it sounded as if it almost wasn't a choice (like I was some how legally obliged to). Normally I wouldn't have taken the bait at all, but she came in late at night (making sure two brand new parents were would be very short on sleep at that point) talked fast, got us to sign as many things as possible, and then took off like a bat outta hell when she was through..

 

[nobody123]

You need a basic course in Economics 101.

Unfortunately, all intro-level Economics courses nowadays teach utter rubbish like the idea that the unrestricted free market is some sort of meritocracy, and worse - that it is even a force for moral good, such that success is equated with some absolute notion of "good" and value. Both of these streams of unthought lead to exactly the kind of blinkered idiocy that expresses itself in ideas like "if the market pays person x more than anyone else, obviously that is through the (always logical, just and fair) mechanism of supply-and-demand and what they do is therefor that many times more difficult than what someone earning less does." Fucking insanity.

Speaking of which, I nominate any and all economists that cast an uncritical eye on the new framework of economics. (the Ayn Rand fanboys like Alan Greenspan and Milton Friedman, and - it would seem - every clown that teaches college level economics these days). Just to be clear, economics is and pretty much always has been the study of how we produce and distribute goods and services in a world of scarcity. But for the last decade or two, these egregious motherfuckers have tried (and to some extent succeeded!) to include partisan ideological opinion masquerading as fact into the very definition. Economists used to analyze - through rigorous study and elaborate, detailed modelling - things like the value of a dollar spent on, say, education vs. a dollar tax cut to the rich. But new textbooks try to cut that off at the pass by defining economics as a tradeoff between taxing always productive, always investing-their-useful-capital rich and the rest of us slugs. ...in the fucking definition! These textbooks present ideas that used to be hotly debated, like for example, does a minimum wage hike improve or harm economic growth, as a foregone conclusion and fact. No need to prove or explain in detail. It just is. Believe us. Don't think about it too much though.

And above all else, never forget that the free market is a perfectly fair mechanism. Always infallibly perfect... fair... must be good then, right? If it is good for the market, it is "good". Period. The market is some sort of cosmic, Zenlike force that, like the Dude from the Big Lebowski, abides. According to them, everything works (except, hehe, when it doesn't. But what's another global financial meltdown among friends?), everything balances out, and it is so obviously all for the good.

Get paid more than everyone else? Then naturally you "deserve" it because the market has determined that you are worth that much more. You have an idea, product, or service that is not able to cut it in the pure, unbiased world of the free market? Doesn't matter if it is something that could better humanity, it has been deemed unworthy. Don't worry though. If it is really "good" someone else will put it out there and make a profit off of it if you can't. And if not, well, it wasn't really a "good" thing after all now, was it?

The lie that the market is somehow rational, coherent, and consistent has become part of the definition instead of a theory. And the amoral motherfuckers that lead the clown parade have drawn a corollary that equates this perceived (if entirely inaccurate) "fairness" with "goodness". Economics is no longer considered a way to model complex, often irrational interactions and address the question of scarcity, it is now presented as a pure science with an absurd veneer of mathematical precision. It is a law of physics. And it is a God. Except that it is a mugs game rigged by the fuckers on the top that collapses on us below time and time again.

Anyways, economists. Yeah. Fuck them.

 

[caldave]

It is more difficult to become a professional athlete than a brain surgeon. That is why professional athletes are paid enormous sums. Plus for every one that succeeds, there are thousands more left scrounging for peanuts.

More difficult???? Give me a fucking break, sure the chances are a lot less as every kid who can throw a ball or tie a pair of skates is trying to get one of those coveted spots....but more difficult? please !

As for the ones scrounging I guess they'll have to get an education and a normal job like the rest of us.

 

[icespot]

Prime Minister

You could say he is doing the same job a tampon does.

He is in the best of places doing the worse of jobs.

 

[MissCroft]

Prime Minister

You could say he is doing the same job a tampon does.

Hey, don't insult tampons!

 

[oldjones]

You need a basic course in Economics 101. The NBA generates about $6 billion in revenue because of about 500 players playing professional basketball. It doesn't matter how those revenues are generated. The players then get a cut of about 60% of the total intake because there is no revenue without the players.

Now about advertising. According to Yahoo Sports, "Nike was bringing in $900 million in revenue before signing a young rookie out of North Carolina in 1984. That rookie turned out to be the greatest basketball player in the history of the NBA and made Nike a sporting superpower. Michael Jordan’s popularity and superstar status helped turn Nike into the sports giant that it is today. Now Nike is the largest athletic shoe company in the world with over $19 billion in annual sales. In addition, without the growth and popularity of professional sports over the last 20 years, where would Electronic Arts be? The video game maker made its name off of its sports division titled EA Sports. This division developed one of the most popular video games ever, Madden Football. Electronic Arts has profited by using the images and likenesses of professional athletes in its Madden Football, NBA Live and NHL games."

Now, surgeons are obviously more useful to society than professional athletes. But there are about 5000 brain surgeons in the US compared with 500 NBA athletes. From Economics 101, we know that the scarcer a product, the more expensive it is. Which is why those NBA players make significantly more than brain surgeons.

"No one pays professional athletes just for being good at their sport?" That statement of yours is rubbish. It is the fact that they are good and therefore well known that make them attractive to corporate advertisers. See Michael Jordan above.

All that stuff boils down to: Pro-sports (like vampire dramas, demo derbies and other entertainments) are useful commodities for those who sell advertising to business, which was my point. The only bit that supports your original contention that it's more difficult to become an athlete than a surgeon is that the NBA is currently restricted to 500 players. Sure, and the NHL once had just six teams. If scarce job opportunities are what you intended, when you said being paid to play was more difficult for athletes than doctors, who could argue?

But this thread's about respecting a professions, not how few can get a particular gig. There may be only a handful of professional executioners, but does that qualify them for more respect than guys who jump? I admire talented people who have perfected their abilities and craft, but the fact that Michael Jordan and Lawrence Olivier earned world-wide reps doesn't make their shared profession any more respectable than when it was the trade of vagabonds in wagons, not stars in chartered planes. Nor any more difficult to get into than when kids ran away to join circuses.

As for the why of paying some athletes their big bucks, I stand by my original contention: They get paid for the same reason Beibs gets paid, because they're all in the same business: Getting lotsa folks to watch them in any way they can. So that the guys that sign their cheques can turn around and rent and re-sell those eyeballs. There are thousands of superb professional athletes in the world, but most just scrape by. They're every bit as physically accomplished as your NBA players, and every bit as skilled or even more so. But because no one's figured out how to attract enough exploitable eyeballs to watch their sport, nobody pays them to be eye-candy, like your NBA guys. Or like Victoria's Secret models.

You can respect your NBA players—largely for their incomes it seems—all you want, and someone else may have more admiration for chess masters. Or marathoners. Or solo circumnavigators. Or guys who can land a Quad Salchow. Those are all just personal opinions which everyone has, and beyond argument from someone who disagrees. However, specific reasons you advance and contentious statements you make to justify or persuade to your opinion are not. Sorry, but you have yet to accomplish either purpose.

And Econ101 had nothing to do with what was worth respect (or money) back when I sat in class, it was all about how, where and when money flowed as, and when, worth was agreed on. Which we haven't yet.

 

[Morning Glory]

Sps who are all about bieng a scam artists and not much more