Quote Originally Posted by xerx View Post
Bit of a segue, but a lot of professions which predominantly employ women, like nurse or schoolteacher, should pay a lot more. Both are extremely important, even minus the years of schooling of a doctor or a college professor. Compared to places like Japan and Finland where teaching is a well-paid and respected profession that attracts some of the brightest people, American teachers get both the shaft from administrations and have to deal with young punks leading childish rebellions against the most accessible authorities in their lives.


I mean, you get diamond drillers up in Northern Canada making $20,000 / month starting wage... for, uh, drilling stuff. I know it's market demand for minerals & danger pay that make this shit possible, but yeesh... it's a job for meatheads who like spending six weeks at a time in total isolation with forty other meatheads. When they come back to town, their hobby is blowing all their money on meth and hookers. These people shouldn't even be the same species as Homo Sapiens, let alone raking in 20K.

I had a friend who worked as a mining assistant one season, and he told me that the best drillers did cocaine on the job to help them concentrate. His regular shift was 14 hrs / day, ostensibly maintaining mining equipment; all he really did was roll joints for the miners.
The business in the US is far more volatile than Japan and Finland. Most countries look at the US as having the currency of last resort. This means that resource exchanges within our currency... trades... etc... are globalized far more than Finland or Japan. In our economy you are never going to have education as valued as other things. Not going to happen anytime soon, sorry. In truth we need to reevaluate how we do education, privatize it more possibly.. more on the job training. The student loan bubble is going to splatter everywhere pretty soon as education is a very over-invested commodity.