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The thing is, a lot of ‘traditional’ jobs are bullshit now.
Farmers: half the EU’s budget is agricultural subsidies (edit: 37% in 2017, down from 70% in 1980). The other main source of income for them is when the village council declares their land constructible, another form of subsidy. The production of food is just some hypothetical scenario (they get paid to leave the land uncultivated) these real estate guys known as farmers dangle to soak up more subsidies.
Japan completely protects their rice farmers from competition (with subsidies on top), so to keep their WTO commitments, they are forced to buy rice on the international market, which they let rot until they can feed it to animals. The asian rice penury from 2008 was solved when Japan got permission from american farmers to sell their useless rice back to the international market(wiki, asianometry video). The latest round of farmer absurdity was EU farmers forcing a tariff on ukrainian exports: the country the EU is currently shoveling money to, whose economy they’re trying to keep running. Robbing peter to pay paul so that piotr and pierre can steal it back from paul to pretend their job has any economic value.
Teachers: we are massively over-educated, and they make it worse. Doubly useless, they encourage others to be non-productive. A university professor who rants alone in a room would only be half as damaging. To be fair the early teachers do provide daycare for the normal kids and prison guard duties for those who can't read.
Doctors: Attending to hypochondriacs and prolonging old people’s suffering.
A farmer once told me "farmers run land management companies with a farming problem"
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What. For example, what do you think paediatricians do?
Same thing. They soothe parents who panic and hold the hand of leucemics.
It’s the hansonian argument about doctors being more about showing people care than producing a substantial increase in qaly. And the background modern increase in qaly caused by clean water, vaccines, antibiotics, which you don’t need all those doctors for.
Jesus Christ. It's one thing to observe that a lot of QALY and DALY improvements come from "clean water, vaccines and antibiotics" and then entirely another to imply that additional interventions are zero or negative expected value.
Do you think that our (now quite successful) treatments of childhood leukemia are as ineffectual as extending the unhealthy lifespans of the very elderly?
That's not the work of most doctors. Even the specialists administering the treatments are essentially just following protocols that were invented and tested by a very small number of people.
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Huh, okay, looks like childhood leukemia really took a beating these last decades. Yay science.
Still, most docs spend their time talking to old people and recommending negative EV surgeries.
I may have been a tad harsh. Unlike farmers, who went from useful to parasitic, doctors improved over time. They used to kill people, drink their blood and feed on their suffering, now some of them occasionally manage to help humans.
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I would view subsidized farmers like an army: in good times, a waste of money, but in bad times, essential to the sovereignty of the nation. (Of course, both the farmers and the army require petrochemicals to have any effect, but unlike food and trained fighters, you can stockpile petrochemicals just fine, and nations generally do.) Obviously, this does not mean that a breakdown of international trade would not be bad: most high-tech products have globe-spanning supply chains. But there is a difference between "your population no longer has access to their fancy Starbucks coffee, or new iPads or the chips which your car industry would require to continue building cars" and "your population is starving".
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I disagree with you about the value of education. I will grant that at least half of education is pure credentialism. Go to university, pay your dues, get a paper you require to get a good job, learn whatever you require to do the job from the internet.
I have an advanced degree in STEM. A lot of the stuff which makes me a non-zero value employee I picked up on the side, sure. And sure, everything I learned I could have learned from books (for free from libgen) or educational videos. But I can also tell you that I would not have done so. Without the structure and the tests of traditional educational institutions, it is very doubtful that 22-year old me would have woken up at 9:00 one Thursday and started watching a video on the Gram–Schmidt process at 10:00.
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Despite being someone who tends to avoid interacting with the medical system where possible (a hyperchondriac, if you will), I vehemently disagree. Most physicians do not actually like to pander to hypochondriacs. I am very pro-MAID, but I do not think that most of what doctors do can be fairly described as "prolonging old people’s suffering". Most people do not seek euthanasia at age 50. I generally support trusting people to determine if their life is worth living for themselves.
I think every jobs includes some bullshit components, and physicians are certainly not exempt. Often, doctor's offices are run as a business (and a weirdly over-regulated business at that), and you will see them peddling additional preventive healthcare to patients which is not covered by insurance. Or they will have to spend a lot of their time dealing with health insurance companies. Obviously, most dentistry should be a skilled trade, there is no need to require a lengthy university education to handle a drill. I think that The Elephant in the Brain is making a good case that a lot of the the costs of the medical system are actually due to signaling. But at the end of the day, there is a pretty substantial non-bullshit core.
That’s what they want you to think. This lobby group is so powerful because it has arguments tailored for all kinds of people. To greens they say they preserve the ecology, the meadows and all the little birdies. To conservatives, the character of the land, the connection to ancestors, they eat that shit up. To social democrats they emphasize the need to safeguard their jobs from the destructive forces of the market. And to greys, they play the strategic food reserve card.
Why can't you store food? Let’s do some back of the envelope math: CAP budget is 55B/year, with germany shouldering 25%, that’s 13B, that’s €0.45 per german per day in subsidies.
That’s imo a large underestimate of alll the subsidies they get. Most peasants I know build a house on their land, which they can then sell for a large profit, because normal people do not get to build a house on cheap agri land without tons of red tape. When a piece of my grandparents’ land was declared constructible, it was like winning the lottery to them. Plus the tariffs and all the protections they get and all the problems those protections cause. Like the japanese customer who pays to subsidy the rice, then pays a higher price for it, then pays again to buy some other rice that gets destroyed to compensate WTO partners. A significant share of EU-US trade disputes, like every trade dispute, are caused by farmer lobby duels.
So let’s double the estimate to 90 cents/day/person. I think you can feed a man for about 9 cents/day on non-perishable (conserves and such) goods. Because you can feed a man for one day for 5 cents in vegetable oil, and that’s retail. So if we cut the subsidies and went with my strategic pemmican plan, after about 10 years we’d have 100 years of food for everyone. Talk about food security. And then we’d enjoy our extra euro per day. And that’s assuming we all forget how to farm once the subsidies subside and we are henceforth incapable of producing a single beet.
Because it goes bad?
Tin canned, freeze dried, etc.
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