I did retirement home training and used to think it was a sweet job. Then I got in the business and underestimated how demoralizing it was as they give you the easy elders in training while the others make you, or at least me, really think of the fact the job just amounts to an unkarmic freebie.
Cop
Landlords. Do I think it’s terrible for some nice old person to rent their basement to students for a good price for a bit of income in retirement? No. But corporate landlords and people hoarding housing can fuck off.
Recruiters.
100 percent agree. Recruiters are a waste of oxygen. Back when I was in school I attended this massive recruiting meet and greet. Head hunters from the largest firms in the area attended and talked with the students about career prospects. A recruiter from a big firm was there bragging about her arbitrary strict screening process for resumes. This Karen, a failed elementary school teacher, gloated about how she required a full page cover letter, and a full page resume. There could not be any blank space. She would measure the margins and if not exactly I inch she would throw the applicant in the reject pile. The cover letter would have to be a full page long. If any length less than 1 full page straight to reject pile. However she stated would never actually read the cover letter.
A week later I attended a Q and A with several partners from the biggest firms in the area. They all talked about how they hated absolutely HATED cover letters and bloated resumes. All they looked for was prior experience, grade point average, and whether the applicant is licensed or not. Funny enough the partner from the same firm as the Karen recruiter had a 2 minute rant on why he hated cover letters.
Any sort of high pressure sales sucks.
How much do you hate them?
Name a number!
How about if I drop that hatred by 22% with a 2.1% financing? And throw in a free coupon to Chili’s if you verify within the next 45 minutes! Hurry act now we’re running low on coupons. And you don’t want to go home empty handed, do you?
Maybe not unique in my opposition…but…
CEOs. (Especially of large companies)
They rarely know what they’re doing, are guessing 90% of the time, bandwagon anything they think will make them more money or notoriety, and get paid exorbitant amounts of money doing nearly nothing to actually earn it.
Naturopaths.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there’s folks doing sane, evidence-based care in this area. But I’ve seen so much bullshit from practitioners, ranging from the grossly unethical to the blatantly dangerous, that I find them hard to trust about anything as a group.
Besides, we already have health professionals that can provide good, evidence-based care (issues like ego v. evidence/new findings to improve care notwithstanding - but there’s crappy people in all fields) - we call them doctors and nurse practitioners. And we need more of those.
Local natural food store sells Homeopathic medicines. We’re talking water selling at the same price as ink jet printer ink.
Car sales person.
If you’re saying that you uniquely oppose the existence of elder care as an occupation, then that is a very strange, and frankly worrisome example. Am I misinterpreting what you meant? Also, I don’t know what to make of “unkarmic freebie.”
Having known some people in elder care, the reality is that some old people are nasty, brutish, mean, racist, misogynist, creepy, violent, you fucking name it, there’s some old person you’re going to have to take care of who matches that horrible personality. You’re paid the same whether you’re helping someone you like or someone who is rude and assaults you every time you enter the room.
I agree with you, elder care should still exist, but I can see why some people get tired of taking care of terrible old people who were likely terrible people all their lives and who are just allowed abuse you. Why are they allowed to abuse you? Because most people who do elder care and underpaid, overworked, and don’t have a lot of other options that pay nearly as well. Basically you’re accepting middling but better than fast-food pay to have abuse dumped on you. I can see how someone feels like its a karmic freebie because there’s no responsibility in any of it, generally management won’t do anything about “problem elders.” Get to be a fucking asshole your whole life and then get to be a fucking asshole to the person wiping your ass before you die.
I have a similar story from another friend who ended up at a mental health hospital in a violent youth ward. He was underpaid, overworked, and responsible for about 30 violent and dangerous kids with unstable mental health issues that made them difficult to approach. If he was busy helping one kid take their meds, and another kid on the ward was in the same moment trying to take their own life and succeeded, he would be the one responsible. He was not being paid enough or had enough support to justify taking full responsibility for things that are outside his control when he cannot magically manage 30 dangerous cases at once. He left the job after two months of assaults and scares. I don’t blame him, and he doesn’t blame himself, and we also understand that those 30 cases deserve better care than they’re getting but it’s not his responsibility as an individual to make up for the shortcomings of government funding for this.
Same with people who work elder care. It’s not their individual responsibility to make up for the fact that these companies don’t give a damn about the people they’re caring for, and each elder is just an income stream in a database. The number of people I know in elder care who now have permanent back problems because they’re being expected to lift 300lb old people off their beds and they’re not being given proper equipment for it is too damn high. These people do not deserve to have their bodies broken and paid pennies on the dollar to be abused by the elders in their care, not given the right tools to do the job, with a prevailing attitude of “they’re just old people, how bad can they hurt you really?” Pretty fucking bad, shockingly.
Elder care needs to exist. Does it need to exist as it exists now in the USA? Abso-fucking-lutely not.
In the kids case, that’s a staffing issue. Most lockdown mental health facilities have a tech/CNA whose sole job it is to walk around and log the location and state of every patient every 9-15min, depending on policy. In addition to the techs/CNAs who herd everyone to group, meals, and all the rest. In addition to mental health staff that run the groups. In addition to nurses who do meds and assessments. In addition to “orderlies”, not big men in white like in movies, who tackle people these days, but people with intense training in deescalation.
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In the elder case, that is often a staffing issue. If it’s day shift and you have more than 6 residents assigned to you, that’s a staffing and/or state level regulation issue. If it’s evening shift and you have more than 8 residents assigned to you, that’s a staffing and/or state regulation issue. But yes, declining mental health (dementia) and brain deterioration (Alzheimer’s) is part of elder care. Sometimes it’s the sole reason they’re placed in a home, because that decline in brain capacity requires 24h care.
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A lot of health care jobs would be absolutely ok if they were actually safe for both patients and staff. But corporate greed often doesn’t allow for that.
Staffing matters. And it often will be ignored until the state mandates a law that requires the corporate owners to do better.
Tip:
you can replace your periods with three dashes to get a horizontal separator, which I think is what you were going for. It’s markdown syntax, it should work for most clients.Spaces between paragraphs don’t really show on Memmy and walls of text suck.
Whatever works, I’ll try it.
Spaces between paragraphs should work, you have to use two new lines for them.
They seem to work on my instance’s web interface and on Jerboa…
Private equity/venture capitalists - they acquire unique brands and then extract all the value and enshitify them into the ground
One of the reasons Boeing sucks is this. First reason is McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeings money, hallowed out the soul that built the world’s greatest aircraft, then sold what was left off to the big investment funds. Then the investment funds were like “look at all this money Boeing is spending on safety and suppliers” so they cut out the safety and bought out the suppliers. The horror stories of quality control at some of the suppliers is just as bad if not worse than some of the horror stories of quality control at Boeing. What if I told you Boeing fought to have ECS (environmental control systems) software that was written by third world “programmers” that didn’t speak English to remain on their aircraft illegally, claiming it didn’t pose a threat to safety, you know those systems that determine if there is enough oxygen to breath at altitude and whether the temperature inside the plane is survivable…
Vulture capitalists.
Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.
Taxi/uber driver / chauffeur
Rancher
Slaughterhouse worker
Insurance claim assessor
Animal breeder
Fossil fuel miner/minesite worker
Gas station attendant
Propane salesman
corporate lawyer and politician. sleaziest of them all
Lobbyists
Well, lobbyists work not only for evil corpos, but also for NGOs and movements… Lobbyism is the process to sway politics to a direction through interpersonal meetings, and is necessarily in a democracy.
However, one thing that would benefit the US is transparency around lobbyists; who they are, how they are funded, their agenda etc. The EU has a database on registered lobbyists and the transparency helps with parts of the problem.
This needs higher up. Lobbyists are a cancer
Guidance counselors. One of them tried to convince my parents that I was on drugs…in 4th grade. Turned out that I had an undiagnosed mental disorder.
I had similar experiences. It’s like there’s a small but noticeable subset of the population that wants to pin “drug user” on any person they meet and think is weird. Meanwhile, actual drug users are everywhere and mostly manage to act normal.
The number of times I’ve been told I’m high just because I have a schizospectrum disorder is too damn high.
Wall Street. Shorts, bulls, bears, options, it is all euphemisms for gambling and everyone else suffers for it.
Advertiser
That shit should be illegal, with like a living whitelist so you can still put out a sandwich board in front of your restaurant.
Yes, I know that will implode entire sectors. They deserve it.
There’s a city in France - Toulouse, IIRC - where the mayor ran on a promise that “if you elect me, I’ll remove all the billboards.” Turns out that was really popular, so now that city does not have any billboards.
I cannot for the life of me understand why billboards are legal in general. We’ve gone through the effort of banning distractions like even touching your phone while you’re driving, which makes sense, but yet these massive advertisements who’s literal sole intention and purpose is to get you to look at it instead of the road exist and are everywhere. They’re also complete eyesores. Why?! It surprises me there hasn’t been more campaigns like that, I can’t imagine billboards are exactly a popular idea
Dope.
There’s a good next pet issue for me once over-restrictive zoning is gone and dead. I guess public transit is a perennial bee to put in my bonnet, too.
Mad Men was hard for me to keep up with because I just hated everyone and it made me angry
This. “Marketing” is just a euphemism for “propaganda” – it is inherently manipulative and therefore evil.
I once saw a video report on bullshit jobs, where they also interviewed a researcher into how much value is gained or destroyed by various professions.
They said that for every £1 (the researchers worked in the UK) given to marketing executives, that society suffered £11 in lost value.
