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Ask Slashdot: Future-Proof Jobs?
An anonymous reader writes: My niece, who is graduating from high school, has asked me for some career advice. Since I work in data processing, my first thought was to recommend a degree course in computer science or computer engineering. However, after reading books by Jeremy Rifkin (The Third Industrial Revolution) and Ray Kurzweil (How to Create a Mind), I now wonder whether a career in information technology is actually better than, say, becoming a lawyer or a construction worker. While the two authors differ in their political persuasions (Rifkin is a Green leftist and Kurzweil is a Libertarian transhumanist), both foresee an increasingly automated future where most of humanity would become either jobless or underemployed by the middle of the century. While robots take over the production of consumer hardware, Big Data algorithms like the ones used by Google and IBM appear to be displacing even white collar tech workers. How long before the only ones left on the payroll are the few "rockstar" programmers and administrators needed to maintain the system? Besides politics and drug dealing, what jobs are really future-proof? Would it be better if my niece took a course in the Arts, since creativity is looking to be one of humanity's final frontiers against the inevitable Rise of the Machines?
but being a plumber or AC repair can't be shipped overseas.
Don't focus on specific jobs, focus on skills. Skills such as problem solving, understanding abstractions, and of course strong communication skills, both written and verbal. Skills involving dealing with and understanding people's needs will never go out of demand.
Engineering has a strong future: Robots. Nanotechnology. Advanced materials. Hydrogen storage. Fuel cells. Automation technology. Rapid building techniques. Vertical farming. Take any industry she likes, then work with a company that is going to do it better with technology, using fewer humans to do the work.
Seriously, try to imagine describing a lot of the things people do professionally now to someone 30 years ago. Some of them are genuinely incomprehensible. Quite a lot, even.
You can't have a future-proof job. You will have to adapt as the world changes.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Mortuary Science
Get some experience doing nails just in case.
At some point, I don't see the world being able to avoid a paradigm shift in how we measure careers, labor, etc... we have invested in and achieved so much in terms of automation, ai, etc, and yet we refuse to distribute the high efficiency benefits of these things to the very masses who brought them about and are being displaced by them. If it takes less labor, per person, to make the world work, then it truly should take less labor, period... not the same (or, as things have been going lately) more labor by the few still employed while those at the top of the economic food chain rake in the entire difference just for themselves. In the end, our current path is resource wasteful in a time when we can't afford it, and all for the actual benefit of very few people. It's an untenable and unsustainable practice that's going to have to change, and I don't see us regressing to old technologies just to reestablish old careers when we already have (and simply aren't properly dispersing) much better.
2nd the above. Send her to a trade school. The nature of the work is local. It has some risk of automation but little risk of being offshored. As long as we need water plumbing will be needed. Electrician might be less future proof depending on advances in wireless power. Car repair will see some decline with electric cars. (they have less parts)
Look up the best careers. Most of them are in the health care field. I don't see robots/automated systems taking over health care any time soon.You will not be rich, but let's just say comfortable.
Seriously, I know it's all anti-fem movement and all that but someone has to take care of children might as well take care of your own.
However, if having kids isn't your thing then you want to be somewhere in the robot design/maintenance track. So, something like Engineering or Computer Science would be best. Not everyone is good at math and abstract problem solving. Learn to do that really well and get some people skills and you should be able to stay at least marginally employed.
Another option might be to join the Military. There will always be a need for Generals even if all the grunts are robots. Someone, has to tell squad A to attack point B, and I'm not convinced that the lowly soldier will ever really be replaced with robots. Someone will always fight once the robots are defeated.
Also genetic engineering of crops might be a good thing to go into. We are going to need better yielding crops if we are going to support all the unemployed TV zombies the Robot's replace in the job market. Otherwise, someone might get the idea in their heads of limiting the population.
Common dangers to your career and wages are:
1. Outsourcing
2. Automation
3. Disruptive innovation
4. Boom and bust economic cycles
Ways to protect your career and wages are:
1. Merit and Knowledge
2. Restricted professions & credentials
3. Union or government position
Not all dangers are avoidable, for example disruptive innovation is all but unavoidable, but boom and bust cycles are easier to survive in a bigger industry.
Not all way to protect career are available to everyone, for example merit and knowledge is unobtainable goal for significant portion of population (merit, by definition, it is zero-sum game). Additionally some have drawbacks - proximity to government or union usually has negative effect on one's maximum earning potential.
Now for more practical advice - a technical profession that interfaces with government, requires accreditation, and deals with local or critical infrastructure would be most stable long-term position. Civil engineer, food inspector, dentist are some typical example.
As other worthies have probably pointed out elsewhere in the comments, the best idea is to learn critical thinking and remain flexible. STEM education is valuable whether you're working in your specialty or not. Unlike Underwater Basket-Weaving or other majors that seem like a great idea as a freshman, STEM educations generally push students to learn basics about how the world works that can be universal (including submarine crafting mechanics). I have this same issue with my kids and I think the answer is just to let them know that building a network and constantly learning is the highest-payoff strategy but no guarantee. Anyone giving a job guarantee is, to paraphrase, lying or selling something.
Also I'm planning to have my drugs delivered by Amazon Drones(tm), so that's not a future-proof occupation either.
Are you kidding me? You're planning your daughter's career based on predictions from Kurzweil and Rifken? They both have notoriously bad track records. Kurzweil is the guy who predicted that we'd have automatic translation for phones ten years ago. (He claims that his prediction held true because 2004 smart phones shipped with crappy text translation apps, but it is obvious from context that he originally meant real time voice-to-voice translation.)
I have no doubt that much of what Kurzweil and Rifken predict will eventually happen, but their timelines are far too optimistic. IMO, the best advice you could give your daughter is to keep away from factory work (everyone will be replaced by robots relatively soon, even in China), law (far too many grads, far too few jobs -- you need to go to a top 10 school if you want any shot at a good job), and academia (same problem as law).
What does she want to do. It's fine if she doesn't know yet, too many kids are forced into a box too early, but those are the types of questions you should be asking her. What is she good at? What are her hobbies? There may be jobs she doesn't even know about that may relate to them that you can help her discover. Picking a profession is not something really that should be done on statistics/probability.
That said, of course it's good to reign in certain things - there aren't a lot of jobs for underwater basket weavers. But, you could suggest offshoots of that - either a basic business degree to run her own shop, or something in textiles/manufacturing. But it's always best to go with what she likes and/or is good at as a starting place - vs. figuring out what has the least amount of risk and going for it no matter what the profession is.
This is where those "aptitude" tests that you take in high school might be helpful. I'm sure there are equivalents online, or her school might still offer them. I'd never use them as a sole resource, but they can help you find things that may not be obvious. In high school one of the careers that mine said was "law enforcement" which at the time I laughed at - yet now, in my mid-30's - I suddenly found myself working in a different field in the private sector, but as a financial investigator. Something to those tests, I think.
Car repair will see some decline with electric cars. (they have less parts)
And fewer parts as well. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
You really can't automate health care.
Yes, you can and it has been.
And it can be offshored. I worked on the software for McKesson that enables X-rays and whatnot to be offshored, Pharmacy robots, and various things are automating healthcare. It's amazing how much of medicine is just following a flow chart - even at the physician level.
In the not too distant future, we will be seeing healthcare being mostly automated: at least in other countries that don't have an organization like the AMA. Step into a full body scanner, anything the system can't recognized is sent to a doc/tech and a solution will be given: lifestyle change, prescription, or whatever.
Even today, computers are more accurate in diagnosing illness than doctors.
I would suggest healthcare. With the aging population, there will be a greater need for personal care. Even a healthy older person will need some level of care. I do not think robotics can handle this area well.
I would agree, with one caveat... Don't be a doctor. It takes WAY too much debt to get though medical school and wages for doctors are going to be in sharp decline.
An RN is a good choice. You can get a 4 year degree in nursing without going too far into debt. If you are a good student, get your RN then work on getting licensed as a physicians assistant. If you are not that great of a student, then there are a whole list of "technician" positions, like running the MRI and ultrasound machines which don't take 4 years in college.
That's not to say that a STEM career isn't a bad choice. There will always be a need for engineers and software developers, maybe not a whole lot of them, but there will be at least SOME jobs in this area forever..
But there is one thing we all need to realize. Where it was once normal to do the same job for your whole career, you need to expect to change careers two or three times if you are starting out now. The key is to be flexible, be observant and keep adapting to the market around you.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
We all know eventually the only ones profiting will be those who own the robots. So become a capitalist. Take that money she was going to spend on a college education and start a business instead. A few rules, though:
1) It must not be something other people do for free for fun. Don't become a photographer.
2) It must be something where eventually other people do the work while you make the money. Don't become a freelancer.
3) It must be scalable. That is, adding workers/locations/production increases profits. This is similar to "don't be a freelancer," as there are only so many hours in your day.
4) When you're finished, you can sell the business to somebody else. That is, it must be a business that accumulates assets, rather than just service contracts.
Good luck.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The answer really depends on several things, but she should start by looking at what she is good at and what she enjoys doing. Trouble is, for kids coming out of high school, they may or may not really know either one of those things yet. I knew right off that I enjoyed writing computer programs (taught myself Basic and some C during high school), so I went for a CS degree for system programming in college, and ended up working as a sysadmin. My wife was the opposite, and didn't find out that she enjoyed working in health care until having to get a "real job" after a couple really bad years of college. I also have a nephew who spent almost 8 years in college, switching majors (and sometimes colleges) every semester for the first 5 years until he found a passion for social work.
If she doesn't have a specific field that she is interested in, but she does want to go to college, I would recommend she pick a degree program that offers an Associates degree mid-way through, (or just go for an Associates of General Studies,) in order to make it easier to get a job or switch colleges halfway through, should the need arise. (In other words: be prepared.) If she wants to go into a field where she would need an advanced degree such as a Masters or PhD, I recommend picking a university that offers the advanced program she wants for her Bachelors' degree, as they often offer automatic acceptance to students who received their undergrad from them, and also may offer dual grad-school credit for some advanced undergrad classes.
With regards to books recommending one avoid studying computer science, I have one statement: We have not reached the Singularity yet, and if nobody studies computer science, how are we supposed to get there?
Pretty sure they already have a robot for that.
I have an ex-roommate who does refrigeration repair ... the pay's okay, but the hours can really, really suck.
He's on-call every couple of weeks, and might have to drive an hour away to fix a chiller at a grocery store; if they can't get to it and get it repaired before it warms up too much, they might have to destroy thousands of dollars worth of food. (and if you to go and get parts, you're kinda screwed) I don't think it's quite as bad as the 'always on duty' as some sysadmins get stuck with, but it can be much more stressful than you'd expect.
I also don't know if it's quite as steady work, even with the 'can't be shipped overseas' argument; my
understanding is that with the slowdown of new home construction, there's an oversupply of pipefitters, so companies aren't necessarily hiring. (this might vary by city).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Tell her to study home economics.
Ok, I'm sure dude here was trying to troll and all... but...
Any kid strait out of highschool needs, desperately, to have true home economics down. And I don't mean cooking.
Never own a credit card. They are all scams and are far more likely to ruin your credit than help it.
The basics of double entry bookkeeping.
The basics of Auto loans and home loans
The difference between Mutual Funds and Index funds and why you should always go with an index if you can.
What a fiduciary is, and why you should never take investment advice from someone that you don't have a contract with.
The difference between a 401k and a Roth IRA, and why you need both and why paying off your house before retirement is bad.
You should be investing at least 10% of your income into retirement. Really, 10%.
In the vast majority of cases you will get paid the same if you get your degree from a tech school, where your tuition will total under $10k as you would from a state or private college where you're going to pay that much per semester! (i.e. go to a tech school unless you want to be a doctor)
I came from a very poor family. My parents pulled themselves up through hard work. They didn't know a lot of that stuff, I had to go out in the world and learn it on my own. But I see a LOT of kids come out of school and just have no clue. They get financially ruined by scam artists as soon as they walk off the stage at HS graduation. They go to a state university to get a nursing degree when hospitals are so desperate for nurses they're actually paying dental assistants to go to school in my local area!
It doesn't have to be that way. Educate your kids on this stuff. If you don't get it all yet, go with them. My life completely turned around when I took some pretty simple 1 week courses at the local community college.
I agree with Confucious there! As a teacher, I can say I have seen plenty of people chasing after the job-of-the-week. The company goes under, and you lose your job (or to keep it, you have to move out of state, country, live on an Antarctic glacier, etc.), then you have to retrain and spend a fortune. And they're not happy, because they lost their job, they're worried, they're in debt, more debt now because of student loans, and now they have to do some stupid job they don't really want to do for the oil company because that's the only way out they see. Nuh-uh. Don't let her grow up like that.
Everyone I know that followed their own path (granted, small sample size, etc etc), has seemed to end up way better off. They do what they love, they are in demand because they are good at what they do, and just everything seems to have a way of working out. Make sure she knows (1) what she loves; (2) how to think and solve new problems; (3) give her an entrepreneurial spirit, so she can CREATE HER OWN JOB and take care of herself if she doesn't want/find one in the market.
I think that last point is perhaps the most important. The best (and really only) way to prepare for the future is to learn how to take care of yourself. Create your own job, live on a budget and NOT be in debt (debt makes you a slave to the job trends since you can't settle for a more fun but less paying job), grow your own food, pick up a few trade skills to do house repair, etc... Of course definitely encourage higher level thought if she wants to be an engineer, but if she wants to be an artist, let her, as long as she knows how to take care of herself.
I'm not sure that the blatant misogyny in the joke here is worthy of anything higher than a -1: Flaimbait, but really: if you can completely automate production of every single thing that people depend on for their day-to-day lives: food, drinking water, medicine, and shelter: what's left?
Sure. Sure. Art, science, human progress. We're never going to give those up. Taking care of your own home and family would be the one obligation that would remain as a personal duty(yes, regardless of gender).
It's not yet, but at some point we're going to have to assess our work-ethic culture with the inevitable collision with technological progress.
You consider suggesting she learn to be a homemaker to be misogynist?
It's an important and fulfilling role, more important than ever in a world full of fucked up little bastards, deserving of your respect. It's you that is the misogynist for suggesting that only a persecuted woman would choose such a task. Just because a homemaker isn't producing something for you personally in exchange for your money doesn't mean what she does isn't of vital importance to us all.
You suggest she'd be most useful as a modern jester for your amusement. That's a pretty horrible thing to say. You're a real piece of work.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Testing 123
Wow, that was quite a load of tests.
We just saw the last one, though.
Pastor, plumber, electrician, and dentist were listed in an article I read recently.
The problem is that they all presume a functioning middle class which has money to pay for their services.
We could get into a situation where 50% of the population can't find jobs unless we pass lower overtime laws (32 hour week max) or provide a basic income to everyone from taxes on those who are working or some other entirely new approach.
It's really a paradigm shift coming.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Suggesting she become a homemaker despite her explicit request for career information and knowing nothing about her other than her gender -- yes, almost certainly misogyny.
Train for Management, Business Administration and Making Tough Decisions(TM). There is no way that our corporate masters are going to outsource/offshore/automate their own cushy positions or let the great unwashed get their hands on the robots producing the goods.
Stick Men
Or just learn to shoot a gun and get really buff.
I don't see toilets going away anytime soon....
Most problems with toilets are because they are simple, dumb, and gravity powered. In the past there was no other way. In the future, they will have sensors that optimize the flush cycle, and use a pressurized system to automatically clear clogs, while using far less water per flush. They will use electrically actuated valves, that are far less likely than the current "lever and flapper" valve, to get stuck in the wrong position, resulting in even less waste of water. In the near future, toilets will be smarter, more efficient, and require far less maintenance.
People fear automation and the progress of technology, that somehow it's going to put society out of work. I think this view is backwards. If you've worked in the labor force for a decade or more, you might have noticed that historically there have always been jobs where people sit around all day and do practically nothing. It's parodied in movies constantly because it's a reflection of what's pretty much always been the case. Like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho - just one character from a whole cast of characters who put their feet up on desks and got paid copious amounts of money for seemingly nothing. Or Sam Lowry's desk job in the film Brazil. That's just how it went, the technology didn't exist at the time to make companies efficient, and they needed to get certain work done, so companies just had tons of these almost meaningless positions. This is mostly the reason why global competition was such a wake up call in the 70s and 80s. We've gotten a lot more efficient and a lot of positions are just removed. There's really no future proofing of anything, and the term itself is marketing junk. If you want to provide value in the job market, have a career that requires creativity and has a high learning curve and high market value. Also, always be willing to learn new skills that will help you maintain this value since skills inevitably become obselete.
Never own a credit card. They are all scams and are far more likely to ruin your credit than help it.
That's basically lowest-common denominator advice -- a better piece that is still a simplification is to ensure your credit card use is always backed by cash (your accounting tips may help in tracking that independently of the banks). A majority (admittedly not a vast majority) of people pay in full every month, and thus do not lose and typically gain from credit cards (other than possible cash-only discounts which aren't super common and imply no debit card either). cite: http://www.creditcards.com/cre...
I agree that it's exceptionally rare that doing anything other than paying in full every month is a good idea, *especially* when you need that cash to eat because that starts a death spiral.
[...] and why paying off your house before retirement is bad.
Also an oversimplification, this one dangerous. There was a time when mortgage rates were higher than some credit card rates...
Tell her to do what she enjoys for as long as she can because life is a lottery and you can't predict how it will turn out.
Tell her to study home economics.
Never own a credit card. They are all scams and are far more likely to ruin your credit than help it. .
This is terrible advice. Credit cards are the easiest way to build credit. The advice should actually be: Pay off your credit card in full every month. If you won't be able to pay it off, don't buy things with it.
The rebuttal: "This is too hard for some people" is not a reasonable response to this. This is a trivially easy behavior pattern to adopt. If you can't do this, I don't believe it is possible to be financially secure. This is the smallest, easiest, step in playing the game of our society's financial system.
See, I get the misogynists. They're idiots. But the people who out of their way to see zero misogyny in blatant misogyny. They're the ones who concern me.
Because that seems to be the normal reaction to justified accusations of bigotry these days: an immediate switch to defensive mode without a thought in between. And if that's normal, then every fractional scrap of progress has to have the whole argument over basic human equality be fought over and over.
What does she LOVE to do?
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
are not very easy to offshore and demand is not going away either.
Tell her to become an M.D. and specialize in obstetrics. Unless there are no humans, humans will still have babies, and the process of delivery will still be fraught with problems. If she likes art, then maybe industrial design. Widgets may end up being 3d-printed, but someone still has to make them look pretty.
Considering that 25 years ago, someone talking about "the internet" would have been largely met with baffled stares, it's pretty sure that most of the jobs that are going to exist in the first world in 40 years may not have even been imagined yet.
Then again, considering politicians inability to let ANY special interest group go unsatisfied, just about any job is "safe" - if the buggy-whip manufacturers had had better lobbyists, they'd still be employed too.
-Styopa
Perhaps I shouldn't have went for subtlety when attempting to burn karma. Nevertheless, I'm amused that /.ers don't know what the world's oldest profession is and at the same time probably need its services more than anyone.
Computers _are_ replacing accountants. Or more precisely computers are replacing bookkeepers and a lot of so called accountants are actually bookkeepers.
Most of the drudgery is leaving the profession now. What's left will be much more interesting and valuable work, but I suspect there will be a bit of a glut in lower end accountants.
The problem is that you'll probably have to work where there's no air conditioning, because it's either broken or hasn't been installed yet. That might not be fun in the summer in southern states. But at least you won't have to work in shit like a plumber would in "emergency" situations.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
healthcare is going to be offshored. Countries are gearing up for healthcare tourism. You hop on a plane go to a spa and get several procedures done cheap. Once insurance companies get on board you will have no choice in the matter. You will get your choice of doctors from a list outside the country.
Pastor, plumber, electrician, and dentist were listed in an article I read recently.
The problem is that they all presume a functioning middle class which has money to pay for their services.
We could get into a situation where 50% of the population can't find jobs unless we pass lower overtime laws (32 hour week max) or provide a basic income to everyone from taxes on those who are working or some other entirely new approach.
It's really a paradigm shift coming.
If things get to the point where the richest country in the world can't pay for dental care for the majority of the population then I think unemployment would be the least of your worries.
My friend tried to get a $1500 car loan when he was in college. He has held a job since he was around 13, was at his current job for several years, has lived at the same local address for over a decade, he had a great GPA, he could have easily paid off the $1500 in a few months, but he was going to college and had some unexpected expenses.
All of the banks in our area out right refused to give him a loan because he had no credit history. Even the bank he had used since a teenager and had direct deposit for the past few years. They plain told him that even if he had the worst credit score possible, they'd give him a loan, but no credit history meant no loan.
In the end he had his parents co-sign, but the point is no credit history means no credit. It's a catch 22. Credit cards on the other hand, are given out like candy. Easy credit history.
I'm in a situation myself where I can't get a house loan. I've had the same salary job for the past 10 years I alone make over 2x the the average house hold income, I've been averaging a 6% raise per year as a programmer, I've been living in the same apartment for 6 years, no late rent and my land lord loves me. Yet I can't get a house loan because of my lack of credit history. The banks have all told me to get a credit card and start using it to pay my bills to help build my credit history.
Suggesting she become a homemaker despite her explicit request for career information and knowing nothing about her other than her gender -- yes, almost certainly misogyny.
Homemaker is a career, and it does take certain skillsets that are developed over a lifetime. It's an important career chosen by many women throughout history. Consider what happens if the next generation is not nurtured and educated.
And it is a future proof job - can't outsource child making and rearing, and she has capabilities unique to her sex. (eg: half the potential competition of other career paths) Kids are also an effective retirement plan when raised well.
Even if you don't think it's the best option, it's a valid option, and a noble one.
Any specific trade you learn is subject to random technological revolutions. You need to learn as much math as you can cope with, because it's at the core of any engineering or science, which are the jobs that add value. You need to learn basic finance, even if your real accounting is going to get done by computers or professionals. You need to learn a bit about demographics, because that's one of the big things that drives what technologies and jobs and financial practices are going to be around in any given decade. You need to learn some hands-on skills so you can fix your own stuff, build your own art projects, and have some generally satisfying competence for dealing with the real world. You need to learn to write clearly for almost any job you've got.
A demographic example - the Baby Boom echo of WW II is getting ready to retire (traditional retirement for a few, running out of jobs they're in shape to do for others.) So there's going to be a need for increasing medical care, and for figuring out how to organize communities that can cope with them (traditionally these were either called "cities" or "extended families" or eventually "nursing homes".) There's going to be a need to build or retrofit houses that let you fit a wheelchair through the bathroom door. But financially, there's going to be a lot of capital around that wants to be turned into income, and fewer people working to earn that income. That means that interest rates and stock dividends are probably going to be lower, pension funds are going to be in trouble because the ratio of workers to retirees is lower, and there's going to be a smaller source of taxes on working people to support the retired people who don't have savings or who thought that the Social Security Trust Fund was anything other than a tax on the future generations. (How much of that stuff did I think about during my career? Very little :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
And more complex toilets will be more efficient then the current crop, but they'll also be really complex.
Complexity does not mean unreliable. Semiconductors are immensely complex, yet are the most reliable part of most systems.
There will be multiple failure points, and (this is the key thing), when a failure happens an amateur with a wrench and a basic knowledge of physics will have no fucking clue how to fix it.
Yes they will:
1. Pop out old valve.
2. Pop in new valve.
An electric valve may be complex internally, but to a repairperson it is a single part that requires no adjustment or configuration. A lever and flapper valve may be inherently simpler, but it is more complex to repair because it is many separate parts, that must be installed, adjusted, bent, re-jiggered, adjusted some more, and then still malfunctions and leaks often enough that the water bill is more than the cost of a better toilet.
There's currently a serious glut of lawyers in the US market, and not just in LA and NYC. Sure, graduates from Harvard Law and its peers are going to have an advantage, doing high-end corporate law, but news articles I've been reading recently say that for average-quality law students at average-quality law schools, some ridiculous amount like 1/3 don't have a real law job within a year out of school, and the pay scales don't match the level of student-loan dent they have to pay off for most of them. A lot of the entry-level jobs are things like public defenders (get paid dirt, heavy case loads), or small-town business/real-estate (plumbers get paid better.)
And farming? Are you kidding? Americans may have a warm place in their hearts for farmers, especially if their grandparents farmed, but their grandparents got their butts off the farm and moved to the city for good reasons. And that was before mechanized agriculture radically changed the number of farm workers it took to grow food, and pushed us toward monoculture agribusiness that needs maybe 3% of the US population to grow most of the food, and most of the farm labor is low-paid migrant work. If you inherit some land or are willing to move to a dying town out on the prairie, sometimes you can make it pay off, or and there are some places you can do specialized-market farming and do ok at it, but it's tough work that won't put your kids through college.
Corrections? Yes, the US has far more prisoners per capita than China or even Soviet Russia used to, and until we end the drug war and have some time for its spin-off crimes like the gang business to die down, it'll probably stay big business for another few decades, but most of the work is morally about one step above being a slave-owner and financially it's two steps above minimum wage, competing with a labor pool of people who need a job that doesn't require an education, just a mostly-clean criminal record and adequate citizenship papers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Exotic dancers will probably do well over the next century or so and call girls can do well if they are really sharp looking and smart enough to handle the trade. Very few jobs will exist for humans in any area of work much sooner than most people think. Obviously society will have to pay people not to work. Freedom might become a much more real concept when people are freed from monetary demands. The very notion of concepts such as socialism, communism and capitalism will become quaint and obsolete concepts. The very basic fact that all people need to confront is that "TECHNOLOGY IS DESIGNED TO ELIMINATE HUMAN EFFORT". We are at the toggle point at which technology may actually pay off for humanity. So far the advance of technology has caused as much pain as joy.
I graduated in EE in '69. Over my career everything changed at least once or twice. What I found most important was an understanding of the fundamentals behind the practices. That is, the underlying theory, physics and mathematics. With a firm grounding in those and a feel for how to apply them, I could keep up with the changes. I suspect it is the same in most fields.
A couple of earlier posters noted she should do what she really loves to do, and that is of course correct, but concentrate on the basics at first. All else will change. Don't fight the changes, adapt to them, and exploit them. If you love what you are doing, it is part of the adventure.
Still, life is a crap shoot. It takes a little bit of luck as well as careful preparation. Aristotle said count no man fortunate until he is dead.
Teachers are under attack. They get attacked for teaching actual science, they are loosing there only defense against parents who don't like what they teach, politician are attacking them and their careers.
With the bonus of forcing kids into specific tracks and not teaching to a child's level.
Also, the general make crap pay, have to spend their own money, and listen to parent who won't sit down with theor own kids blame teachers for their kids not learning.
And 40+ kids to a class, and an education system the spend less then half per child that it did in 1969(adjusting for inflation)
Sorry, I don't wish that on anyone.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Never own a credit card. They are all scams and are far more likely to ruin your credit than help it.
This is quite possibly the worst financial advice I have ever seen. Forget about credit. You realize credit cards provide you with free money for 30 days, that is INSURED against all fraud/false claims, and most importantly, offers cash-back (or travel/movie/your interests) rewards by using it?
If you are responsible and pay off your credit card and never accrue/pay any sort of interest, you will actually gain money by using them (through rewards, and the ability to invest the money you spent for free for 30 days!), and be protected by VISA/MasterCard/whatever against bad purchases (someone trying to rip you off).
The only people who say "never use credit cards" are those with no self control, and thus wrongly assume others have no self control either. I have never held credit card debt (unless it was special 0% offers), and every year I get a few hundred dollars just for using it (no annual fee). In addition, several times I have made online purchases, but never received the item, called VISA, and they immediately refunded my card and dealt with the seller.
First we need to revolt against the ridiculously wealthy and send them all to the guillotine. After that it will still take a generation to sort out the mess, less if we can find the right people to re-design a working financial system.
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And when the power fails, you'll have one more thing to worry about. No thank you. I prefer my basic services to be basic.
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Unfortunately computers are not replacing lawyers. It's hard to program a machine based on logic to produce complete bullshit.