The correct answer is: Journalists.
I think you could make the case that that poll is stupid. It might have something to say about Texas, though.
Anyhow academia has to be up there. Any profession where you engage in huge amounts of competition to reach the point where you get to be treated like shit.
Probably not lawyers. I think we're reliably disgruntled.
4: yeah but it might be even worse than you think.
My theory about the state poll: People in high-cost states wish they could live somewhere else, but cheap places suck. (Me, I've enjoyed living in Maryland and New Jersey, and wouldn't want to live elsewhere, but I do miss the rents in flyover country.)
Let's not forget that actual Kool-Aid was invented in Nebraska.
I think a large part of it is that you don't end up in Maine or Montana unless you love scenic, cold, beauty, in which case it's made for you.
What poll are you talking about? The one I know where Maine and Montana do "well" and Maryland and New Jersey don't also has Texans high for satisfaction in the state.
People in high-cost states wish they could live somewhere else, but cheap places suck.
Conversely, lots of people discover that it sucks to move somewhere and triple their commute and housing costs for no real improvement in their quality of life.
Mmmmaybe the thing with the poll is that the places people want to move out of are also places a lot of people move to, which means they're full of lots of people who are homesick or kind of have wanderlust or know people all over or just generally have things pulling them to other parts of the country/world (and not such deep ties to their current location), whereas the places where nobody wants to leave are full of people who grew up there and just have never wanted to move away.
Also, as far as I know they didn't control for population, which means there are actally far, far more people who live in Illinois and want to stay in Illinois than there are people who live in Montana and want to live in Montana.
Actually 12 is probably the whole story; it's essentially just a population map.
My boyfriend is like this about New Jersey, kind of, except he doesn't realize that New Jersey is special. "I want to live somewhere that you can do day trips to the beach, or the city, or snowboarding slopes, and the cost of living isn't crazy," he will say, like these are criteria that could be met anywhere except the specific region he grew up in.
Probably not lawyers. I think we're reliably disgruntled.
I may have told this story before, but my eleventh or twelfth inkling that the law firm business wasn't the best long-term play for me occurred in the course of a perfectly cordial interview at [large law firm with offices in prominent New York City location], during which the partner explained his response to his friends in other sectors who made fun of him for not owning a boat or a private jet or whatnot: "Well, I practice a learned profession." I'd say that remark neatly characterizes the large law firm lawyer's self-image in opposition to the frankly-expressed opinion of his or her clients: i.e., just another vendor, a cost to be negotiated ever downward.
I thought the cost of living was crazy in the nicer parts of New Jersey.
12: Why would absolute numbers be more informative than percents? So what if the happy 40% of New Jersey is many more people than 100% of happy Montanans?
I thought the cost of living was crazy in the nicer parts of New Jersey.
I.e., Connecticut.
15: I can think of innumerable shitty parts of California where he could make that happen, depending on the definition of "city".
Have I ever linked to the Austin Lounge Lizards Another Stupid Song About Texas ?
Texas is the best state because it has beachesPadre Island at 10am in July, in between dodging oil patches and wondering where the waves were, had me saying goodbyes because obviously God had decided to cleanse the earth with fire. Then I remembered if that were the case it should feel a lot drier.
17 to 15. Really, if the average house requires a mortgage payment of over $1,500 a month, I think it's a high cost of living area.
18: all the people who wanted to move out of Montana already left, or already decided not to move there. All it's saying is that the chunk of the US population that might want to live somewhere other than where they're currently living is in the (bigger) cities.
The linked map looks nothing like a population map, in fact. I think Tweety is about to argue that it should be a connected dot plot graph.
I can't understand the OP question. Is it the profession that hoodwinks the most people to go into it on false pretenses, and once they're practitioners they hate it? Or is it the profession where the practitioners have the most inflated and unjustified sense of their own importance? Totally different things.
13: But that can't be the poll from which you're getting "Texas is one of the most detested states by people in other states", is it?
24: How, precisely, would you adjust for that?
Or do you mean adjust for population density?
28: I don't think you could. So it's a stupid poll.
24: It's not saying that at all. California is medium and contains plenty of big cities. Texas is content, and contains Houston and Dallas. Maryland, Nevada, Louisiana, Missisippi are all wanting to move.
27: That was a different poll, which I didn't link.
26: Is it the profession that hoodwinks the most people to go into it on false pretenses, and once they're practitioners they hate it? Or is it the profession where the practitioners have the most inflated and unjustified sense of their own importance?
Neither, but closer to the latter. Which profession where the practitioners have the most inflated and unjustified sense of their own contentedness and happiness with their profession. Not just who's the biggest blowhards.
Which profession where the practitioners have the most inflated and unjustified sense of their own contentedness and happiness with their profession.
Homeopathy.
Right, like who believes (erroneously) that their profession is the very very bestest, and pity the poor creatures who have to do something else. Sure sounds like the professoriat to me.
What? How could someone have an inflated sense of their own happiness? I mean who's to say that they're wrong?
31: okay, I'll rephrase it. It's a map of how much of the population of a given state lives in a MSA.
What I'm implying is that there's no uniform reason that certain places are highly content. Maine and Montana are content because the population has been distilled to people who love cold and beautiful scenery and isolation. Texas is content because of massive self-fellatio. Other places are discontent for individual reasons.
35: An economist with an assumed utility curve.
Which profession where the practitioners have the most inflated and unjustified sense of their own contentedness and happiness with their profession.
Probably still economics.
35: I mean, sure, Texans really do love Texas. But there's some objectivity to be had, right?
Shorter 37: Happy states are all alike, unhappy states are all unhappy in their own way.
37: I know. I'm just not convinced that's much of what's driving it.
profession where the practitioners have the most inflated and unjustified sense of their own contentedness and happiness with their profession
I'm going with the null hypothesis that this characteristic is distributed randomly across the professions. I don't see any reason to think it wouldn't be.
36: Oh that makes sense. Because Arizona and Nevada are unhappy, but Montana and Maine are happy, and Kansas and Nebraska and the Dakotas and Wyoming are all in between. Got it.
Dammit I screwed it up. Happy states are all happy in their own way.
41 is pithy but really not at all what 37 says. The point was that happy states are happy for individual reasons.
44: arguably Minnesota, Mississippi and Hawaii screw up my theory. Hawaii... sure, right, that seems obvious. The other two you probably have to make recourse to something more like what you were saying.
I tried regressing on a cost of living index, and got r^2=.015. (Interestingly, Illinois actually has a cost of living index of less than the national average - maybe too many of the respondents were in Chicago.)
Oh, 33 makes me say, also naturopaths.
45 does make me happy! For highly individualized reasons.
In my head you could get a lot of the way there with two predictors, "% of population in MSA" and "mean annual temperature". But I dunno.
Some cousins of mine moved from Connecticut to Texas when they were teenagers. One of them still relates that when they arrived at their new school, the students there were astonished that they hadn't had a class in Texas history at their school in Connecticut.
52: Go on. Keep trying to capture Texas and Montana with this optimization. Be sure this distinguishes between Michigan and Wisconsin, though.
52: Tell you what, you find me a table of MSA populations divided up by state and I'll do the rest of the work.
The entire financial sector, maybe. I mean, I'm all with 16, and law professors are, as a rule, way worse than actual lawyers. But we're nowhere near as bad as the financiers and their apologists.
54 is deeply hilarious and I absolutely believe it. It is legislated that you have a semester of Texas history and a semester of Texas government if you attend a public university, for god's sake.
profession where the practitioners have the most inflated and unjustified sense of their own contentedness and happiness with their profession
... relative to other professions, maybe? Otherwise I'm with L. People probably know roughly how happy they are, at least better than other people do.
3: Amen. I have been fucking pouring my blood out for my students this semester, despite on several occasions nearly abandoning my job because I hate my life here so completely, with the sole exception of my actual in-class teaching experience, and then this week all I get are endless complaints about how I'm not nice like their other professors who cancel assignments and are easier graders. Also, everything I say is offensive and I need to shut up and stop having any kind of opinion, knowledge, or experience relevant to anything, even the material we are covering in class. Why am I doing this? Oh right, I am doing this in the desperate hope that someone will give me a job doing this for the rest of my life, but with much more scrutiny and criticism.
I think the focus on cost of living with respect to this poll is really a mistake. Contentedness is much more cultural than economic.
This is probably lousy of me, but I think elementary school teachers are probably one of the most overrated jobs. I think even the required lip service to how valuable and important the jobs are makes it worse. The pay is lousy, there's little freedom to design your own curriculum, the hours are relentless, the parents are difficult, and the pay is shockingly bad. But they're saving lives and performing valuable service and if you can read this, thank a teacher. I'm pretty sympathetic to teachers (see: a whole family of them), but those are some seriously lousy jobs where to continue, you have to convince yourself there's a worthwhile cause. Being a professor or a lawyer or finance wizard aren't terribly shitty jobs in general.
11 is basically my theory, with the exception that a couple of states (like Maine) are places people dream of retiring to, so transplants there are probably extremely contented, as opposed to the folks who moved to MD during the recession and just want to go hooooome.
What if all the unhappy people in Maryland work in D.C. and couldn't afford to live in Virginia like a normal person?
58 -- It's fair, though. Outsiders don't really grasp the world historical importance of Goliad, without which there's neither Alamo nor San Jacinto, and really can you considered someone an educated person if they're not familiar with the trials and tribulations of Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar? Also, we've seen the repeated mistake of outsiders thinking that the governor is some kind of big deal -- an office that carries enough experience to merit national office -- when everyone knows its the lieutenant governor who really makes the thing work.
I'm comfortable using the word 'mountains' in connection with those national parks west of the Pecos. But, as anyone who's ever been to Colorado can tell you, there's definitely a culture of Texans going out of state for a mountain experience.
Here is another vote for the entire financial sector.
62 is very close to the answer which popped in my head, which was "SAHM".
I am absolutely not denying that some people thrive staying home with the kids, fwiw.
I'm puzzled by the high levels of unhappiness in Maryland. I suspect the key to being content here is "pretend D.C. doesn't exist".
The pay is lousy... and the pay is shockingly bad.
ydnew is soo materialistic.
66: I'm sure it makes me a terrible person, but that's not a profession! My dear, much-loved college roommate is a SAHM, due in part to her husband's very demanding, 80% travel job and some health troubles. She's delightful, but definitely needs to believe she's doing something valuable and important that contributes to making the world a better place (as opposed to making the decision that was almost certainly best for her and probably the kids). She used to be a teacher, so I think she's already kind of in that mindset. (Nanny, maid, chauffeur, blah blah SAHMs are worth $180K/yr.)
68: I love living in MD, but I know lots of folks who are far from family, want a single family home with a yard, are sad their kids won't be close to their grandparents, think everyone's work-obsessed, and just want to go home to wherever. It seems common enough. Some folks don't like the traffic, or the commute, or the pollution (?!), or the cost of living, or the taxes.
Yeah, profession is the wrong word. Job? Drudgework? Occupation?
69: Yep. I used "probably" twice in that first sentence, too. My public school teachers were way overpaid, giving how I turned out. Seriously, was writing on my way to work and had to look away to cross a street. Not that I'm not materialistic. It's a shame I didn't select a better compensated profession.
My Lutheran colleagues would shame me for forgetting those words. Did you know something something world's great hunger meets your great passion something magic happens?
Follow your bliss, unless doing so would violate a restraining order.
Follow your bliss, unless doing so would violate a restraining order.
There's an emoji for that.
70.2 -- I guess that's right. If they had some sort of narrative where the sacrifices they are making made some sort of sense, serving some broader purpose, maybe that would help. Even without the purpose, feeling like one belongs to a community -- that there really is a community -- makes a big difference.
My Maryland experience was generally positive, but I don't miss it.
Fully in agreement that this has not much to do with urbanicity. (Spellcheck doesn't think this is a word, but its redundancy means it clearly should be.) It would be nice to know more about the distribution, though; you could have a bipolar state where everybody loves it or hates it (Ohio, maybe California) and that'd look about the same on this map as a state everyone's "meh" about (North Carolina?).
So, if I'm following the elementary school teacher/SAHM thread, (a) you're all a bunch of lousy misogynists (I probably have to say I'm kidding here) (b) the rule you seem to be applying is a job with some very clear, obvious drawbacks, such that anyone who's still in it looks to be in denial about the drawbacks, or self-deluding about the upsides so as to make them outweigh the drawbacks. Following that rule, let me offer military service (which I'm cranky about because the Marines have broken my best niece. She can't walk without crutches for the last year, and it's not clear if this is ever going to improve.)
63 reminds me that anyone who dislikes [Texans|New Yorkers|Californians] just on principle probably hasn't met a Northern Virginian.
The SAHM part is not just about the obvious drawbacks, but the amount of misery in (some) SAHM blog entries about relentless struggles and exhaustion, which is then balanced by a hollow sounding concluding paragraph about "I wouldn't change a thing though!"
But Marines is a good one, too.
I was counting struggles and exhaustion as obvious drawbacks. The thought process is (1) man this sucks, but (2) I'm doing it voluntarily, so (3) I must really be enjoying in some more meaningful way.
79: It could be ineffectiveness / evilness of the profession and its impact on the rest of the world, not necessarily just drawbacks specific to practitioners.
Also - is it misogynistic to say that childcare jobs are the worst, or is it proper blaming of the patriarchy to assert that childcare jobs are undercompensated and exhausting and that the patriarchy praises the spirit of generosity because it's cheaper than compensation? I claim feminism.
86: But you're accusing the women who voluntarily take on those roles of false consciousness, which is a misogynist denial of their agency. (Of course, I actually agree with you, pretty much.)
So do have a consensus on whether stay at home moms are worse than marines?
I had a similar thread in mind, about least comprehensible jobs that other people genuinely enjoy. Basically I was boggling that anyone would possibly want to be an event organizer. But people seem to like being event organizers. A lot of events get organized, at least.
I don't know about enjoying it, but I'm always boggled by the sheer number of people who do things that it wouldn't occur to me that enough people valued the task to form a profession.
That, I am always charmed by. "You're a cobblestone-resetter? Who knew that was even a thing one could be?"
Speaking of jobs that I really doubt anybody enjoys, those people who call with "important information about your credit card account" are now calling me three or four times a week. Otherwise, I get maybe one call a week. I think it's a vicious cycle whereby they call me, I wait for a human to come on the line and slam the mouthpiece of the phone on the desk as hard as I can without breaking the phone, and then I get put on a list to get called again out of spite.
I feel like professional club DJs are kind of deluded about how great their job is. On the one hand: seems like glamorous superstar jet-setter. On the other hand: actually, constant travel, spend all your time indoors in the dark, nothing to do but get drunk or high and shmooze with sleazy people you don't necessarily like very much.
That's a pretty small population to count as a "profession", though.
actually, constant travel, spend all your time indoors in the dark, nothing to do but get drunk or high and shmooze with sleazy people you don't necessarily like very much.
Stop describing my job!
Now every time essear goes to a conference I am going imagine him holding a red bull and vodka and scowling amidst snowdrifts of cocaine.
I don't understand the appeal of red bull and vodka, but it is certainly better than red bull without vodka.
97: well, it contains caffeine and alcohol, is I think the premise.
This morning at Crossfit, a woman was saying that she just didn't understand the appeal of Red Bull and vodka, saying "Uppers with downers? I just don't get it."
I had an urge to sing "Uppers and downers are both so intense, put 'em together it just makes sense!" in Olaf's voice (from Frozen), but no one would have gotten the joke, and in fact I'm not sure enough people here will appreciate it, either.
Why didn't I just attempt the joke in response to Moby, instead of setting it up as a failed suppressed joke to the exact same cue? I don't know.
98: And it's easier to prepare than any coffee-based drinks, particularly those that also have dairy.
Don't make the ghost of John Belushi cry, crossfit lady.
Belushi hates Olaf? But he's adorable.
102: and very cheap to make, since you can use whatever shitty vodka. Jack & Coke foundered on the shores of its own branded liquor requirement.
I'm puzzled by the high levels of unhappiness in Maryland
I'd be unhappy, too, if I lived in a state with such a high number of people who drive like they've only just now discovered the brake pedal! Ooh, the gas! Steering circle! (Seriously, though, Marylanders, what's up with your disproportionate share of shitty drivers?)
You can order well-bourbon and Coke without any difficulty at all. I've seen it done.
104: I was talking to your crossfitolleague, not you.
100 -- put it to her this way, it's like why you want to do both pull-ups and push-ups in the same WOD.
IOW, the uppers-downers combo is perfectly consistent with Crossfit philosophy.
105: Captain & Coke knows how to navigate those dangerous shoals.
106: ...huh, I don't have a stereotype for Maryland drivers! I'm disappointed in myself.
107: I dunno the mouth shapes don't seem distinctive enough if it's too loud for the bartender to hear you. You might end up with a Durbin and Goat.
I loved those posters of super drunk people, with Crossfit catch-phrases egging them on. Can't seem to find them now.
The stereotype for drivers everywhere is "not as good as where I come from". The details differ.
"Here at Crossfucked, we have a different, high-intensity drug cocktail every day, to maximize your fuckedupedness while keeping you interested and allowing you to lurch blearily back to your busy lifestyle without a lot of waiting around for complicated drink orders or slow-onset hallucinogens."
@106: I suspect a major factor in my own satisfaction with Maryland is the fact that I walk to work. If I had to commute to D.C. or it's suburbs I'd be pretty miserable.
"Don't stop just because the bar is bending" attached to a sloshed woman with her head resting on the bar.
slow-onset hallucinogens
Say what you will about the paleo diet, it certainly protects against ergot poisoning.
I thought SAHM, too, but that's because my Facebook feed is full of college-educated women proclaiming how it doesn't matter that they don't have a job/didn't finish their dissertation/had to clean poop off the wall at 2am because they LOVE their KIDS and it's the most IMPORTANT JOB IN THE WORLD.
No one who is actually happy with what they're doing talks like that.
Todd has it right in 80, and Moby errs in 63. The folks who are obliged to live in the DC metro area sort into Marylanders and Virginians, with Maryland getting the better of it.
Slightly off topic, but you know what job has to suck, is the publishing company rep who has to call me about my textbook needs for the fall.
Maryland drivers are fine. Its Virginia drivers who come to Maryland and have no idea what they are doing.
122: Hooray! Yes I think those are funny.
124 -- No, I think from Stanley's comment, we see that they know exactly what they are doing: driving way too slow.
I don't think I ever met anyone in Maryland who wished they lived in Virginia. But I never had much to do with tech types, so maybe there's a thing with that.
Chemists drink a lot of Kool-Aid about their profession, potentially more than any other scientific discipline. (except maybe physicists.)
128: In what way? My vague impression of chemistry is as a boring but extremely useful profession. (Putting aside chemical engineering, which is more like petroleum geology.)
When I click on the link in 122 I get a screen telling me my Java is out of date and it automatically downloads an .exe describing itself as a Java update but originating from somewhere I've never heard of. Fuck that noise.
Also hopefully they are careful to check that it is actuall Kool-Aid before drinking. Don't just go aroung quaffing blue liquids, chemists!
128: Chemists are all about the sugar to Kook Aid ratio, while physicists think all that matters is the force exerted in stirring.
132: Arguably, the typo improves this comment.
129: Chemists like to call chemistry "the central science", there's a lot of "chemists contributed to this, chemists contributed to that", "let me tell you about the chemistry of this and such."
Not saying that I don't drink the Kool-Aid myself, but I guess that I recognize the sweet, sweet taste of it as I guzzle it down. Dunno about other scientific professions, but boy, do chemists spend a lot of time telling each other how awesome they are.
128: When other disciplines invent antibiotics and cure cancer, they can be stuck up, too. (Kidding.)
129: Sad face.
134 has not been my experience. Sounds disagreeable.
There are local conditions that affect how good a driver you think someone is. Pretty much anyone from anywhere is probably a better driver in some objective sense than most NYC drivers. They do tend to be worse at driving here, because they're not comfortable with the local conditions (lots of very either bad or at least surprising drivers doing unusual things at fairly low speeds in tight spaces).
Mostly it was Flavor Aid at Jonestown, not Kool Aid, I understand.
54 is hilarious.
I'll say one thing for Maryland drivers: they're diligent. My state-assigned tailgaters always meet me right at the border, anywhere, any time.
54 speculation: One of the cousins has the initials GWB.
Re : 134 et al
Hate to say this, and it's anecdotal and a small sample, but when I taught philosophy of science to science students, chemistry students were noticeably less sharp than the rest. The ones who struggled were more often chemists than any other (scientific) discipline.
Uppers with downers is a good combination. At least with my experience of chasing coffee with beer, you get a nice buzzy looseness. Supposedly tequila offers the same thing all-in-one, although I haven't ever quite achieved that.
Florida drivers are the worst, right? Or at least the most dangerous. It's anecdotal, but when I was a kid my family took a lot of vacations driving around the country. There were no scary driving incidents except in Florida, where once a driver intentionally rammed our car while shouting obscenities because my dad paused for a second to check something before pulling away from the pump at a gas station, and another time a car followed right on our bumper for something like an hour honking their horn and shouting because they thought he was driving too slowly or something.
Also, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" took place in Florida, and one of my dad's distant cousins was murdered in Florida in similar circumstances.
Isn't the common slur that chemists are just the pre-med students who didn't get into medical school? I'm sure that's not actually true, but... the overwhelming majority of chemistry majors I knew in college were explicitly pre-med.
Most of the pre-meds I knew were biology majors. At any rate, they have to choose between chem and bio before knowing if they're getting into med school or not.
The talk about uppers and downers has put the The Who song "5:15" in my head.
143, that's interesting. I usually see biology as the pre-med major rather than chemistry. I think there's often better overlap with prerequisite classes and less upper level math. I taught chem lab for premeds in grad school, and the course had something like 28 sections vs 4 sections for chemistry majors grouped with chemical engineering students.
140 actually seems reasonable and not especially insulting. I'd probably be bad at philosophy of science, too. I certainly was bad at actual philosophy.
Since chemists have direct access to truth, they don't really need to philosophize about it.
Florida drivers are the worst, right?
A Cambridge bike shop owner whose blog I follow went on a cycle tour two years ago that was to start in Florida. After only a few days and a bunch of incidents, she rented a car and drove out of Florida. Things happened like drivers throwing glass bottles at her as she drove on the shoulder.
I recently realized that on four separate occasions, I have moved from another state into Maryland. And I'd do it again, were in not for the fact that I live there now.
Since chemists have direct access to truth synthetic drugs they don't really need to philosophize about it.
The stereotype for drivers everywhere is "not as good as where I come from"
Actually, I thought it was a kind of reverse chauvinism (i.e., the drivers where I live are the worst in the country), but maybe that's just me. Because the drivers where I live are the worst in the country.
I don't doubt that more pre-med students are biology majors than chemistry majors, but I was under the impression that a greater percentage of chemistry majors than biology majors are pre-med. But it's not like I've looked at any actual statistics on this, so you certainly shouldn't take this very seriously.
151 is what I thought also. Except that everyone clearly allows Florida is the worst.
A TX love story: A friend had an undergrad lab worker who was job-hunting. He asked where she'd been looking. "Houston or Dallas," she said. "You know, the big cities." He asked whether she'd applied anywhere outside of TX. "No, why would I? TX is the best state." He asked whether she'd ever left TX. "No, why would I want to?"
154: These days, if he was a chemist, he wouldn't want to look outside of Houston (other than the whole 'living in Houston' thing.)
Well, that's silly. Montana is easily the best. I learned a song in kindergarden that says so.
OT: Here's what I spent all morning doing: eating a radioactive egg sandwich* and then hanging around in a waiting room in between Gamma Camera photo shoots.
*it was super gross, but I don't think it was the radioactivity's fault.
How much of the SAHM problem could be solved with infinite resources? Say there was great, freely available childcare for all Americans, courtesy of robot nannies, or that every citizen had enough money to selectively hire warm, nurturing, intellectually stimulating immigrants to look after their kids. There's still a fundamental issue with wanting career success and wanting to spend time with your kids, right?
Was the egg radioactive before it came out of the chicken?
158: That sounds both unpleasant and dull. It must be interesting to be the radiopharmacist in charge of making egg sandwiches (or milkshakes or whatever) instead of IV injectables.
Maybe it was the celery that was radioactive. (Or the grapes? walnuts? raisins?) (wait, that's chicken salad. Never mind.)
It was the same guy doing all the steps. He said, as we were about to start, "Okay, do you have any questions? No? Then I will go put on my chef's hat and be back with your breakfast." Although I didn't actually see him make it so who knows what happened after he left the room.
Then I had to wear latex gloves to eat it. Also it had strawberry jelly on it, ew, and it wasn't actual eggs it was just egg whites, and I wasn't allowed to have any coffee which RUINS BREAKFAST.
But the lab tech dude was nice.
Strawberry jelly and egg whites? Ugh.
Is it that odd for a profession to trumpet its own achievements? I mean, it might be a bit self-aggrandizing (perhaps appropriating some advances better claimable by biology and medicine), and it might make its members a shade more boring at parties, but that doesn't make it a non-worthwhile profession.
135: Sorry.
159: Dunno. I mean, when you're talking about infinite resources, are you talking about not needing to work for pay? Because the non-income producing bit of SAHM/D is something that I think of as a substantial disadvantage, but that falls away if resources aren't constrained.
Even in the absence of crass pecuniary motives, I think most people's appetite for time spent with their children isn't great enough to rule out either part-time or just-full-time (a literal 35-40 hour week) work.
I'm looking at a map of MSAs and the map in the OP link, and I haven't the foggiest idea what makes Sifu think what he's saying (or was saying). To a first approximation, everyone in CA, NV, and IL lives in an MSA, and yet those states are 3 different colors.
164: Interesting.
166: I'm boring at parties now, too? Geez.
I'm looking at a map of MSAs and the map in the OP link, and I haven't the foggiest idea what makes Sifu think what he's saying (or was saying).
Yeah, you sort of never do. That's okay.
On the merits, I would prefer Texas to my current residence in Tennessee, but for my aversion to the proximity of numerous former paramours.
Danny Rae Costello, a Polynesian country singer (maybe part Fijian, part Samoan? I've forgotten) had an album called "All My Exes Live In Polauli." Cracked me up.
Ahem. I'm still active, you know.
QUIT STEALING MY SONGS, TRAVIS.
But, this is confusing.
See, 173-177 wouldn't be nearly as funny if George Strait weren't Opinionated.
George Strait IS DaveL IN "Confusion on Commenter Street."
And my 172 should read Palauli. I can't spell in Samoan any more.
178 is right and I'm a completely disinterested party to that whole exchange as far as anyone without access to the server logs knows.
The stay at home parent I live with has never defensively justified his lack of employment outside the home on the basis of the moral superiority of child rearing. He complains freely (to me only) about the boring, crap parts, too. Conclusion: be glad I'm not coparent with a woman????? That seems odd.
170 is true enough, but in this case you seemed to be making an empirical claim. I guess not.
To the OP, I agree: the military. They have mastered the trick of persuading you that all the really nasty, uncomfortable, dangerous jobs are also the ones that confer awesome. (Infantry, recce, EOD and so on.)
as anyone who's ever been to Colorado can tell you, there's definitely a culture of Texans going out of state for a mountain experience
Alaskans have about this relationship with Seattle and cities, pace Teo.
Visiting Texans going on about bigness and wildness in the presence of Alaskans are an amusing side-effect.
I somehow read ajay's "infantry" as "infanticide" at first, which I guess would be one unpleasant mashup of overrated jobs. I suspect I've made being a foster parent sound pretty miserable, not to mention making it clear it's not exactly a job, but I don't think that required a spoiler alert or anything given the larger cultural understanding.
My boyfriend and tons of my friends are lawyers but I just assumed the universal answer for this was going to be lawyers.
Also Wikipedia lists ten mountain ranges in Texas and anyway mountains are overrated. There's that big mountain in El Paso with huge letters reading "LA BIBLIA ES LA VERDAD LEELA" because they really like Futurama I guess, but that might actually be over the border.
I will say I have a friend who's in university administration and they seem to feed him a lot of crap, like sending him to leadership conferences (which sets off my bullshit detector really loud) but I assume that's maybe just a management thing generally? They have to make you feel like you're A LEADER? He always made fun of me and pretended to have forgotten where I work and would say "how's it going at Farm Aid?" and I would say "so did you ever figure out who moved your cheese?!" We're hilarious.
I've met four people in the CIA, and they were all convinced it was the coolest job ever. To me, it's not clear that the US has ever managed to keep anything secret or steal any secrets worth stealing, but the answer is always "but you only hear about the screw ups!"
But they did overthrow Iran! Successfully! For a while! I hear that was pretty cool for the people involved.
Things went downhill after that. It got so bad that the son of the leading architect of the overthrown had to run a small, public school system.
I actually met the guy who lost a Russian spy in a restaurant in Georgetown. He was going to defect, but then he left via the bathroom. It's a Five Guys now, but there's a plaque commemorating the event.
But I've figured this out. It's definitely doctors. Nobody has a god complex like doctors.
You ask me if I have a God complex? Let me tell you something: I am God.
"Doctor" is definitely the one that makes my opinion of someone plummet the most, relative to what they seem to think my opinion should be doing. That's not about the job being unpleasant though, it's about my ideas about the types of people who go to med school.
Doctors and lobbyists, I guess.
H-G in 89: I gotta ask, what seems so unappealing about event organizing? It's what I do, and I always feel like my situation in life is better than almost everyone else's. But maybe event production just fits my personality. Or maybe this is just false consciousness and I'm proving the post's point. But it feels like true consciousness, dammit!
"I wouldn't change a thing though!"
This drives me bonkers. It always boils down to "I can barely stand being a parent, but if you're not doing it, your life is meaningless." Ok, fine.
197: Keeping track of lots of little details, having to deal with lots of different people, constantly having to initiate contact with people, stress leading up to the event, having to worry about turnout, having a million inconsistent vendor forms or what have you to keep track of...It's all so very interactive and detail-intense. I really do believe that some people would enjoy this sort of thing, but so not me.
I think I'd be quite good at event organising. Ticking things off, shouting at people ...
What do you like about your job, heebie?
Yeah, I guess that's all the stuff I enjoy about it.
You have to enjoy having responsibility, for sure. But the payoff for having the responsibility to make decisions is, then everything gets done your way! I long ago decided it was more pleasant to take responsibility and to have stuff done right, than to avoid taking responsibility and watch stuff get done wrong. And it's fun to create a physical reality that other people inhabit without their even realizing someone is shaping their world.
Interesting to hear what you say, though. I really do feel like I have the neat, fun life I think everyone would want. One thing reading blogs always reaffirms for me is that I have no regrets for not going into academia or journalism, which would have been the likely alternatives. (Undergrad degree in analytic philosophy.) But I guess different strokes for different folks, is the moral. Deep, huh?
I like explaining math. I like having to figure out what will make the concept tough, and what series of questions will get kids to understand for themselves the nuances of the problems. I like bantering with students. I like the fact that the students are adults, and it is not my job to nag them into doing their homework or showing up or paying attention during class. I like the fact that it's a job with a to-do list, with items that can be crossed off and achieved, as opposed to a research job. I like that it's fairly well-defined and repetitive, as opposed to the administrative position I've held for the past few years, which was tons of one-off tasks, and tons of cheerleading to get students to attend extra-curricular activities. I hate both those things.
There's that big mountain in El Paso with huge letters reading "LA BIBLIA ES LA VERDAD LEELA" because they really like Futurama I guess, but that might actually be over the border.
Yeah, it's on the Mexican side.
I'll gowith a financial sector vote as well, but it's almost neck and neck with law enforcement (sorry gswift)
eating a radioactive egg sandwich* and then hanging around in a waiting room in between Gamma Camera photo shoots
My sister! When I was sick in high school, I had to eat radioactive eggs (scrambled and rubbery, no toast, no jam) and sit still in a machine for a long time. This was at the end of months and months of various other inconclusive tests, and after the radioactive eggs, the doctors were able to figure it out: I had Epstein-Barr virus, which was causing gastroparesis. Fun times!
Best question I got about the radioactive eggs was that night at work in a pizza shop. The manager asked, "So is your pee green or what?"
The undergraduate reactor occasionally hotted up some barium (I think) to go into people's radioactive milkshakes. Most of the operators were too young to rent a car and too broke to own one, which made getting the stuff to an airport tricky. I think we found a cab company that dealt with medical transport and/or didn't care. I never was a courier, so can't remember what the handoff at the airport was... maybe one person got to fly as a courier when we thought that was a great perk?
That's a let down. I can see why you don't mention it upfront.
Give him a break; it's not easy peeing green.
I was going to ask why radioactivity is represented by convention with a glowing green, but it looks like most random questions are now answered somewhere on the internet: http://depletedcranium.com/why-does-radioactive-stuff-glow-green-or-why-do-people-think-it-does/
210 makes me happy. Not green-pee happy, but still pretty happy.
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I'm a bit skeptical, but it would be cool if this worked: Hand-Held Spectroscopy Tool Lets You Examine the Molecular Composition of Your Food.
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Or try the Public Laboratory version. Has not been trained to say Cheese, afaik.
I'll gowith a financial sector vote as well, but it's almost neck and neck with law enforcement (sorry gswift)
If we're going with Heebie's "Which profession where the practitioners have the most inflated and unjustified sense of their own contentedness and happiness with their profession" then we are not even in the running.
186: Why pace teo? That sounds totally accurate to me.
Also Wikipedia lists ten mountain ranges in Texas and anyway mountains are overrated.
Texas mountains are overrated, because some of us have been in the Rockies, Sierras, Cascades, etc. and know better.
There are technically some mountains in Texas, but even they are mostly in New Mexico.
218: Including Texans themselves, as noted above. When they want a mountain experience, they don't go to El Paso.
Maybe Smearcase is down on all mountains because he's lazy about walking uphill and does not aspire to coconut cracking thighs.
He picked a hell of a place to move to if that's the case.
I guess Oakland's pretty flat compared to SF, but then, what isn't?
Hm, fair enough. Pittsburgh too, I guess.
I was gonna say Pittsburgh, but they don't don't have coconuts.
Sacramento, on the other hand, is pretty damn flat.
Anchorage is pretty hilly, but not on the level of some of these other cities. This has been on my mind a lot lately because I've been considering moving and have been considering areas where my walk to work would involve a significant elevation gain.
217: I only meet the ones in Seattle; you've had a better sample.
231: I doubt the samples are very different in this respect. In any case, Seattle is certainly considered The Big City by most Alaskans I've met, and going there is definitely considered a treat.
For a sense of the difference in scale, the Anchorage metropolitan area, which contains a slight majority of the population of the state, is approximately the same size as the Salem, Oregon metropolitan area. The Seattle metropolitan area is more than ten times as big.
Oakland has hills, they just put them all to one side.
I somehow read ajay's "infantry" as "infanticide" at first, which I guess would be one unpleasant mashup of overrated jobs.
Infanticide would be unpleasant, no doubt, but is it really overrated?
I was expecting to get more of a kick out of it than I did.
235: Army Infanticide Unit plus Fake-Happy SAHMs. Still not a good idea.
Arthur is the most brutal aardvark ever to get a kid's show in PBS.
OT: In my half-marathon, I was slower than 82% of the men in my age group (40 to 44) but only slower than 81% of the men overall. I'm a bit surprised that my age group was a bit faster than the average man.
Anyway, I'm not limping anymore, but my nipples still hurt.
240.1: did you check where you rate among all the groups? Could be an in-the-wild sighting of Simpson's Paradox.
D'oh.
But, probably just that younger guys in good shape ran the whole marathon, not the half.
I'm not finding good stats on the distribution by age group, so I did some spot checking. I looked at the 20-24 year old men, the 25-29 year old men, and the 35-39 year old men. If I were competing in any of those groups, I would have finished slower than 85% of the men. But for the 30-34 year old men, I would have finished at 82%. I didn't check the older groups, because this is starting to look like work.
Distance running is weird like that. They tracked marathon times over the course of runners' careers, and they would on average improve from age 18 to 27 and then start to decline; but they didn't get back up to their 18-year-old times until they reached 65.
The one time I ran a race (5 mile) I finished either dead last or within a couple of spots of that for my age group, if I remember correctly.
244: the age curve for lots of things look like that. Most measure of cognitive ability, for instance.
The marathon gives out a Pheidippides Award, but it's not for what I first thought it was for.
Coming to this rather late, but...
81: "I wouldn't change a thing though!"
198: It always boils down to "I can barely stand being a parent, but if you're not doing it, your life is meaningless."
Not really, I don't think. I mean, maybe in some instances -- and I can see how it might come off that way -- but, still, I don't think this type of statement (whether by a stay-at-home parent or a working one) is generally directed at people without kids. It's much more self-directed.
I think it really boils down to: "I am unhappy with my present situation but saying that openly feels like a betrayal of my child(ren)." Or, perhaps, actually being unhappy feels like a betrayal of my children. But I can't betray my children (that would be terrible!), so therefore I must be happy, right? From which it follows that this -- whatever I am experiencing now -- must be what being happy feels like.
247: In the years when someone does drop dead at the finish line, they should totally win it posthumously, though.
"I am unhappy with my present situation but saying that openly feels like a betrayal of my child(ren)."
Oh god, the self-recognition.
I'm not exactly unhappy, and I'm on the brink of summer when I can recharge my batteries, but this past few months have been super rough, plus the guilt of "aren't I supposed to be savoring this/they're only little for a short while/blah blah blah".
Oakland has hills, they just put them all to one side.
Similar with Ithaca, really - most people are in the flats.
Parenthood is bloody hard work. I do quite a bit of childcare at the moment, and while I genuinely enjoy quite a bit of it, there's regular times when you think, 'Will I ever drink a cup of coffee or take a shit in peace, again?'
'Will I ever drink a cup of coffee or take a shit in peace, again?'
"Let alone not at the same time?"
re: 256
Yeah.
Sitting on my Eames commode.* Electrostatic speakers tinkling the Goldberg Variations. Sip espresso. Face turns slightly red with effort, but, you know, in a classy mature sort of way.
* that's commode as in a portable toilet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commode#Toilet
: not commode as in some other usage that I googled to discover that there are actually are Eames commodes, but they are some sort of storage unit, and that 'commode' doesn't mean a potty for adults, elsewhere.